*I'd like to expand this weblog's coverage of design fiction by encouraging practitioners to report their own experiences. I envision some personal testimonies, rather like standard design-portfolios. Only with more fiction.
*If you feel that design fiction is your métier, please let me know if you'd like to compose something that volcanically illuminates your labors. I'll likely run it here. We've got plenty of pixels left in cyberspace.
*With that said, let's get straight to the remarkable insights proffered by the first volunteer: experience designer Ms. Nelly Ben Hayoun of London, Chernobyl, Baikonur, and elsewhere.
NO more HEROES
Design fiction: for a hazardous, existential and punk practice.
by Nelly Ben Hayoun
“I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and license to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He also has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.”
J.G Ballard introduction to Crash
“How did I end up there?” I wonder. I am on a chair, my cartable on my knees, staring at my shoes, waiting for my turn.
By the window I can see a white Boeing 787. People already started boarding…. On my right a military-looking man. Fear perspires from my face. He is wearing sunglasses. He takes them off and asks me, “Why are we on the same bench?”
“Not sure…” I think.
“I am off to Palestine to do some rocket fire,” he says giggling.
“Oh, ok…right," a nervous wrinkle just appeared under my eye… I am now close to hysterical… They will find the powder on my shoes.
I am off to Tel Aviv to give a talk after a volcanic eruption in my living room.
Now that I am at the airport on the point of going through a body check, memories and nonsense excite my axons.
It all began the evening before. I decided that it was about the time to meet with 'Sleeping Beauty,' this star of cryogeny and thermo-sexual revival …
This follows a series of other, risky, domestic interventions, including generating Dark Energy in my kitchen sink, lifting off on board of the Soyuz rocket from the lounge, swimming in the bathroom in the middle of a Sonic Booum and discussing with a Yeti in the garage.
(((This useful Core77 interview details some of Ms. Ben Hayoun's earlier critical interventions.)))
http://www.core77.com/blog/starting_out/starting_out_nelly_ben_hayoun_designerperformer__17097.asp
We are in September 9th, 2010. "The Other Volcano” erupted on its red carpet in my living room. It imagined a love-hate relationship, a ‘sleeping giant’ in the corner of a domestic environment, with the power to provoke excitement with its rumblings, and also perhaps fear…
The project aimed to build a series of semi-domesticated volcanoes, to be housed for a couple of weeks in the living spaces of volunteers. With "The Other Volcano" I was trying to question the domestication of nature for entertainment purposes. This “Imaginary Gadget” relates very much to my preoccupation with the juxtaposition of the epic with banal details, the extreme with the domestic.
"The Other Volcano" is the result of genetically modified ‘copulation’ between the Mount St Helens an active stratovolcano located in Skamania County, Washington, well known for its ash explosions and pyroclastic flows, and the unique white Volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania, just south of Lake Natron. Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only volcano in the world that sometimes erupts natrocarbonatite lava, a highly fluid lava that contains almost no silicon. Contact with moisture rapidly turns natrocarbonatite lava white because of chemical reactions that occur when the lava absorbs water.
Like writers, designers have a ‘license to act’, and what this means is we must engage with the hazardous minute-risks of the everyday, and reflect it into a meaningful experience. I believe that adventurous practices such as Design Fiction will generate bombs of contradictions, will rape the pure design laws of Heath and Safety and 3D software.
Design fiction is as the powder, the propulsion system to new forms of individual and social Imaginations. I am not a dystopian, I truly believe that everything is possible as long as…. It starts with chaos.
“In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life,” said Sartre.
I guess this applies to "The Other Volcano"…
My good friend Austin Houldsworth was in charge of the explosive system… “Nelly I am not sure what will happen,” he said.
"Well there is only one way to know, isn’t it?"
My landlord is living on my flat’s bottom floor…. As I learnt, with all products comes a risk assessment:
The Other Volcano erupts in an explosion, breaks through the floor and ends up in my landlord’s flat.
The Other Volcano’s smoke comes out of the windows, an alert is given by a sensible neighbour and we ends up with London Fire brigade at my doorstep.
The Other Volcano creates smoke damage in the flat. Black powder all over the white paint.
I get arrested and am believed to be an Al Qaeda member, sent to Guantanamo Bay detention camp. My mum will send me oranges that I will never receive.
To prevent this, we have:
A fire extinguisher .
A leaf blower to get the smoke out .
A good dose of faith…
Some grenadine syrup. I brought it back from France and promised to offer it to the fire brigade in case they have to turn up…
Everything goes fine, but I walk on the red carpet with shoes that I will use the day after, to take the plane to Tel Aviv.
For an existential Design: Existentialism, this ironical and potentially dangerous philosophy encouraged the public to mythologize the wild, flamboyant and radical. It challenges power structures and decadent behaviors, it disclaims absurdity and boredom in the everyday and responds to it with passion, thrill and free will.
This existential altitude is one of the democratization of experience: it is the punk realm.
There are ‘NO more HEROES’ as we can all achieve wisdom and generate new urban myths. Existential design would then mean: not to serve reality with great zeal, but actually to live to create its fiction.
My job, then, is to interfere in-between the two, and to propose alternatives. Meaningful experiences, for all of us to access our fantasy. As with "The Other Volcano," this can be violent and risky, but I hope this designed experience can lead to social actions.
Let’s shake up Sleeping Beauty and take the Chaos Road on a Harley Davidson…!
Let’s rock design!
