INNOVATION
"WONDER, FICTION and DESIGN"
by Bruce Sterling
From INNOVATION Winter 04-05
Why do I–a science fiction writer–spend more and more time with designers? What does science fiction have in common with industrial design? As it turns out, quite a lot.
In the science fiction genre, we have a signature product that we call the "sense of wonder." This is what we are supposed to supply eager consumers: works of wonderment. Amazing stories, fantastic stories, mind-blowing stories.
Look at Lord of the Rings. An award-winning, wonder-inspiring, high-end popular fantasy that involves imaginary architectures, cities and suburbs; tens of thousands of monsters; cool weaponry and unique costumes; and almost every kind of collectible spin-off gear. The movie is an apotheosis of Bel Geddes industrial set design. A design that came from 150 Silicon Graphics Octane visual workstations, running Alias Maya as their core 3-D application, plus an eight-processor Silicon Graphics Onyx2 system running Discreet Inferno for compositing, plus 80 dual-processor Silicon Graphics Linux OS-based workstations.
This ultra-cyber-Broadway panoply of stateof-the-art theatrical gear doubles as the computational hardware and software needed to design, create and manufacture real-world, real-life industrial products. You could basically peel 'em right off the screen and slam 'em into mass production.
You see this sense-of-wonder business also in the industrial design profession. If you want to see some truly classic American industrial design sense of wonder activity, you have to look back to misty, legendary, mythshrouded industrial designers such as Norman Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes designed a number of practical, commercial products for the industrial mass market–stoves, cocktail shakers, radios–but he always seemed more at ease coming up with wild, wondrous, off-the-wall schemes such as a ritzy hotel built inside a giant concrete dam or huge, amphibious, transatlantic flying wings with enough room inside for a squash court.
And who can forget the Futurama General Motors Democracity that he designed for the 1939 World's Fair? Bel Geddes was originally a Broadway set designer, and his wild-eyed, deeply inspiring efforts are basically theatrical fantasies dressed up as industrial products.
Science Fiction or Design Fiction?
I call myself a science fiction writer because that's the name of my genre, but when I'm trying to pin a scene down on the page, I'm really writing "design fiction."
I spend a lot of time thinking about imaginary industrial products, cyber products and post-industrial products. Design thinking has become a powerful means to my end.
I write fiction about science. I grapple with scientific knowledge from a literary perspective. I am using literary techniques to bridge the gap between what we have come to know about the universe, what that knowledge means to us and how that knowledge feels.
In doing so, I've found that a designer's approach is fruitful. It is more productive, more authentic, more convincing and more moving than the wide-eyed approach of a sci-fi visionary, a new-age guru, a pop-science Mr. Wizard figure or even a dot-com stock promoter.
Why? Because designers possess some kind of empirical reference, their ideas are linked to physical reality. If you aim at the sense of wonder first and foremost, if you grasp boldly and directly for the transcendental and the sublime, then you will end up utterly disillusioned, armpit-deep in the slime of the human condition. If, on the other hand, you approach the actual and study it with care, objectivity and with a humble, inquiring spirit, then you will reveal the sublime.Truth will drop her veil for you, and she is indeed a very wondrous thing.
Fiction about truth is inherently more interesting and engaging than fiction about delusions. It took me a surprisingly long time to figure this out. I had the disadvantage of having to unlearn a lot of my genre's bad habits in order to get here. But I'm no longer interested in my genre's bad habits; instead, I've become interested in design's bad habits.
Design's bad habits are bad for designers, but they're absolutely great for science fiction writers. I'll give you a cogent example. Let's say you're an industrial designer trying to get a bunch of skeptical industrialists in some corporate boardroom to pony up 20 million dollars so they can retool the factory and build something you've just invented with a pencil and graph paper. This is basically a "suspension of disbelief" operation. It has distinct literary, fictionalizing qualities.
You've got to come up with some smooth line of gab to get these clowns out of the way so you can talk to the engineers and actually make the product.
Perhaps you don't believe that the quest for the transcendental will cause you to fall into the pit of human squalor, going down with all hands like a struggling mastodon. But it is the higher truth. Consider Wernher von Braun, the European interplanetary rocket visionary. He aimed at the stars and hit London. What are those big, shiny space rockets for? Ideally, for escaping the grip of gravity and touching the face of the cosmos. But they're also for annihilating children as they sleep in their beds.The harder you aim for that first goal, the more likely it is that you'll hit the second.
You want something closer to home? How about cyberspace. The early rhetoric was all about the Internet's weightless, idealist, transcendent, light-speed, anonymous, virtualizing qualities. But look at the Internet 15 years later: It's a filthy, carnal place. Almost every form of rip-off, fraud and human chicanery imaginable plays some kind of role on the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is riddled with holes, infested with viruses and bugs. It's a seething, septic mess.
Don't be disillusioned. We're getting a valuable message here. We need to create the kind of society that understands this on a bone-deep level.
Demographics and Tomorrow's Market
One of the things I like best about designers is that, unlike scientific historians or techno-sociologists, they tend to be user-centric.They're not creating fine-art objects for their own sake, they are actually designing some thing for somebody–or at least for some demographic.
Design has regional or national character: There's Italian design, German design, Japanese design.
But the roots are shifting. The world is globalizing– perhaps not culturally, but definitely technologically. There are 6.35 billion people in the world right now. Barring some plausible catastrophes such as sudden climate change or global plagues, we're going to top out in about 2050 at roughly 9.1 billion people. Ninety-eight percent of the population boom will take place in the so-called developing world, especially Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
Pakistan already has a population that's as big as Russia's. Europe is growing in population just a little. In fact, the population growth in the European Union equals six days of population growth in India. In the next 50 years, the growth in India's labor force will be as large as the entire working population in Europe today.
You might think that this will cause India to burst, but I doubt it. If the trend continues, in the 2050s, we're likely to see a rather sedentary, settled, well-educated, technically capable, population of Indian and Chinese origin, globally connected to huge outmigrations of Indians and Chinese in gigantic, polyglot megacities all around the planet. These are the young people who, one way or another, are going to be doing most of the work to support the huge populations of elderly from today's developed world.
That is the future design consensus. You're designing for the demographic? That's tomorrow's market.
The trend is getting legs now. China is experiencing a construction boom of such colossal proportions that they are searching for scrap iron from all over the planet. People in the Ukraine are stealing entire trains to sell to the Chinese scrap iron market; people in Shanghai and Milwaukee and England are stealing manhole covers to meet the Chinese demand for steel.
I'm interested in this Asian population surge from a design perspective. I wonder what Chinese and Indian designers might want to make–what they would talk about at the IDSC or the IDSI. in what they want to buy. The consumer of the future isn't some cornball Chinese stereotype in a bamboo hat or an Indian villager in a Gandhi loincloth. This guy is the mid-twenty-first century's everyday native citizen. He's not unlikely or strange or transgressive in 2050. He's the average, the norm. So, who is this guy? That's what I wonder–what I need to wonder–as a science fiction writer.
What am I going to say that means something to him? What does he look like? Does he look and dress rather a lot like, say, Karim Rashid? That might not be a bad guess. A very bright, fluent, articulate, multiracial guy named Rashid who makes "blobjects." This is the truth about the future, as far as we know it. We ought to be getting right on it, exploiting this creative opportunity.
The Future Truth of Blobjects (etc etc etc a whole lot etc )
http://www.sanjosemuseumofart.org/blobjects/
