Speculative Design Fiction

Services: Design Fiction, Design Thinking, Story Telling

Project

As a part of our final project for Design Principles and Practice course at the University of Waterloo, our goal was to create a speculative futuristic design proposal set in a utopian or dystopian background. The proposed solution should clearly identify a problem and suggest means to extrapolate from that problem. We worked as a team of four and presented the final deliverable as a video and interactive installation in an exhibition setup at the university campus.

Objectives

Using speculative or critical design proposal build a futuristic world and ideate in the same way in order to agree on the specifics of the world the proposal is designed for.
Engage with the world around you to clearly identify a problem and to extrapolate from that problem.
Build prototype around the main concept, is there a specific technology or diegetic prototype that the fictional world revolves around?

My Role

As the main project researcher, I helped building the narrative for our prototype. I did extensive research and collected data from scientific and healthcare journals to find authentic sources to lay foundation for our speculative world. I also did voice-over narration playing different characters for our final video.

Throughout the process of the project, I worked with the team on ideation, world building, prop building and location scouting sessions. Also, I was a part of all collaborative team strategies and helped putting together project and image documentation for the final deliverables.

The Process

Building a Speculative Future World

We started our design thinking process with solo ideation and then used those ideas in group to pick our top speculative idea based on it’s creative and imaginative parameters.

World Building

We then worked on world building exercise for a dystopian future by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways using the key elements based on our original idea. World building helped us create context for the story and helped us observe and develop empathy with the target user.

Narrative

Our story was set in a post-apocalyptic world in 2085 when a viral infection spread through a DNA modification in 2050 killed half of the human race. We build our narrative around the world of a little girl who lost everyone and had beautiful memories with her loved ones that consoled her during the dark times. We decided to work on a prototype of a memory box through which survivors can connect with their past.

Diegetic Prototype