ETech: How science fiction helps technology design

Julian Bleeker works at Nokia, heading a team of designers in LA, and also helps run the Near Future Laboratory, a design studio. And at O'Reilly's ETech conference in San Diego, he decided to give a talk that brought all those things together: explaining why science fiction isn't just important to engineers – but vital.

He starts out by showing the classic scene from Minority Report; Tom Cruise using his hands to manipulate data that's being projected in the air in front of him.

The technology is cool, he says, but incidental.

"It's fascinating. You wonder what's going on. But what's more useful to pay attention to is that they're not really emphasising the technology itself. They cut back and forth so that the context is much more important."

(It's not the technology itself, but how it could be used that is important).

It was so powerful that Minority Report became the focal point that helped a lot of people play around with the idea of similar interfaces.

"The film provides an anchor into these imaginary worlds that become substantiated," he says. "The film becomes a reference point for thinking about new possibilities."

He points out that John Underkoffer, a consultant on the film, went and formed his own company around the same ideas.

"Stories matter more than features, specs and engineering," he says. "It's the way in which you construct a story around it that helps them imagine what it might be. The framing of a new idea helps translate it, so they can become involved. It's not a marketing story or a pitch."

Jurassic Park is another example he points to. They needed realistic dinosaurs for a powerful representation of a speculative story, and used films explaining how the process took place to cement it in people's minds.

In essence, Bleeker says, science fiction objects are just like engineering or design prototypes – except, in many ways, they are even more effective.

He references a statement by David Kirby, who lectures in science communication at Manchester University:

"Diegetic [narrative] prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes; in the diegesis these technologies exist as 'real' objects that function properly and which people actually use."

Science fiction can do things that science fact cannot, he says, and it's better at circulating knowledge than science fact ever is. There are no barriers between disciplines, no obscure knowledge-sharing rituals and it talks to the public (whereas 5,000 experts in a subject usually end up talking to each other).

Where does this take us? He shows some videos (go and watch them yourself); Death Star over San Francisco, and Metalosis Maligna.

Then he refers to the sequence in the Dark Knight, where Batman takes Lucius' ubicomp system that takes everybody's phone and turns it into a sensor. That becomes a point of contention between them – is it right to spy on people? – that relates to the worries people have.

Similarly, 2001 helped guide the way lots of engineers thought about the future.

He suggests reading science fiction as a manual of the possible.

"There are insights to be had when you read Bruce Sterling as software documentation," he suggests. "It helps to think of science fiction props as a conclusion to the engineering projects of today."

You’ve read it. Now review it.

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