Picture yourself in a supermarket aisle in 2050. These new ‘magic meatballs’, brightly coloured for the kids, seem worth a try. Better have some of the meat powder too, one of the more established products from the mass-manufacturers of cultured meat – you can make that creamy meat-based fondue that always satisfies. You don’t fancy the meat ice-cream today, but there’s still time left for a trip to the deli counter, for some expensive, but delicious ‘rustic’ meat, matured in special vats, or perhaps some knitted steaks. And you can pile your cart secure in the knowledge that no animals were harmed in the making of any of these offerings.
At the moment, in vitro meat is a laboratory venture, yielding expensive and unappetising-looking muscle fibres that might be fit for filler in pies or burgers. Who might want it, and what for? The authors’ open-ended, imaginative approach makes the book a good example of a new way of questioning technology: design fiction. As questions about technological choices trouble us more and more, it could be that design fiction, not science, has the better answers.
The stories we tell ourselves about technology – typically, optimistic ones from would-be innovators, pessimistic ones from their critics – are usually too simple. Making them more complex can support a richer discussion about where a technology might be going, and the kind of futures it could open up. That calls for a kind of realism in the depiction of technical possibilities that is inspiring a new cadre of practitioners of design fiction, or critical design. In the cookbook, for example, that realism comes from using a familiar recipe format to take the reader into unfamiliar worlds. The future facts are imagined, but not fanciful in the context of current research. They might never happen, but they could.
There are plenty of other examples of this effort to spur us to new thinking. In 2014, the Near Future Laboratory, have an entire compendium of possible future products, from drone dog-walkers to environmentally sound seed-based feedstock for a 3D-printer. Other designers are committed to making actual objects or convincing mock-ups to think with. Either way, it is the detail that diverts. The 3D-printer cartridges, complete with model numbers and prices, look close enough to real adverts for things you’ve already bought to carry conviction. These finely textured depictions of the potential accoutrements of the future stimulate discussion in ways that earlier efforts to imagine technology often fail to do. They might even offer a more effective way to create futures we actually want.
Design fictions draw on a long tradition of technological storytelling. Every technology starts with a story. We don’t know how the first hominids who fashioned a hand-axe from a flint shaped their thoughts, but the very action of flint-knapping implies a plan for the future: the result will be better, in some way, than the flints already to hand. So it is with all technologies. ‘A tool always implies at least one small story,’ writes the historian of technology in Technology Matters (2006). It begins in the imagination, and that imagining extends to what the tools will help us to achieve.
These stories can be as dry as a patent, or as fanciful as a commercial for some new gadget that will magically endow your life with the shining perfection of the product sold (Google Glass, anyone?).
They are also interwoven with more familiar kinds of science fiction. The ties between scientific speculation, technological imagination and sci-fi are close, and complex, even if genuinely new ideas most often come up in the tech arena first. Arthur C Clarke is often cited as a techno-visionary for his ideas about geostationary communication satellites, but these were first outlined in 1945 in a technical essay, not in fiction. And yet the causal chain can run in the other direction: road map to the planets fundamentally shaped for space policy and, earlier, the pioneers of rocketry drew heavily on the fictions of Jules Verne and H G .
Often the imaginings of sci-fi and technology work as an echo-chamber, reflecting ideas back and forth, with tech innovators claiming sci-fi inspiration as a way of communicating what their devices might do.
Sci-fi media can be astonishingly effective at promoting possible technologies.