Julia Jeon

Non-place: scenario

Non-place: Yonsei university’s Y-plaza

Character: Me (or the audience)

Scene 1:

You have a stack of readings to print for your class - all 80 pages of them - and you head towards the entrance to the Y-plaza. The door says pull, and, unthinkingly, you pull it open.

You look to your right and see the huge crowd of people lining up for the cafeteria - you promptly decide to go left

Scene 2:

Before going to the printing room, you head to the ATM first - you normally use your card to pay for printing, but you will need change to charge your laundry card later - you follow the instructions in the ATM and withdraw 10000 won

Scene 3:

Inside the printing room, you go straight to an empty PC -  without looking at the student seated next to you, you pull up your files from your USB drive - after following all the instructions on your monitor, and double-checking to see that you have the correct settings, you press print, close all the windows, and head towards the counter

You request to bind your pages into a book - the woman hands you a tag while instructing you, in a well-rehearsed tone, to “Write your name and phone number please” and “Please collect it in an hour.”

Scene 4:

Now free from your immediate task, you decide to eat lunch - remembering the sheer number of people outside the cafeteria, and not feeling up for anything heavy, you head to the convenience store - walk down the aisle and glance at the food lined up meticulously in their shelves - bypass all the biscuits and buy a sandwich and milk from the cold-foods section - you eat your food in the small table by the corner (in the convenience store)

People come and go - they stand up, throw their trash into the recycling bins provided, and leave - at your table, immersed in your phone, you take no notice of others - and others take no notice of you

Scene 5:

In a few minutes you are done, and you realise that you have more than forty minutes until you have to go pick up your book - you head out to the café and buy a cup of americano - you are handed a signaller, and you take it and head towards one of the long tables - you sit and open your laptop, deciding to study - after a while, the signaller vibrates, letting you know that your drink is done

Scene 6:

Later, you go back to the printing room and ask for your book - the woman at the counter asks your name - after giving her your name, you now have your book –> you go out and head to your final destination, either the library or your club room, to study

The documentary will be expressed in a series of panorama pictures and hand-drawn animation with background noises recorded and set as the main audio for each scene

April 4th, 2018
Tagged: scenario  personal project  non-place 

Review: “Design Fiction as World Building” and “30 Days in ActiveWorld”

“Design Fiction as World Building”

Core Research Ideas:

Design Fiction, World-building, Speculative Design

Research Question:

To address the unstable paradigm that the concept of Design Fiction rests upon and, through examining the links between narrative and Design Fiction in two examples of Design Fiction, to clarify and reinforce current discourses on Design Fiction upon which a “first stable paradigm” can be built.

  • What is the connection between Design Fiction and narrative?
  • Does ‘fiction’ denote unreality, or does it refer to story?
  • If a Design Fiction’s diegesis is its ‘story world’ what does the word ‘story’ refer to?
  • Does this application of ‘story’ refer to something that is a fabrication, fictitious, made up, or does it refer to narrative, literature or plot?

Key theories:

The paper elaborates upon the word ‘Design Fiction’; specifically, it concludes that Design Fiction is akin to world-building, where its ultimate goal is to create a credible world with a cohesive system and social structure that closely mimics our own reality or takes aspects of our environment to build a more imaginative setting. 

The paper first addresses the confusion that surrounds the term: the fact that narrative, which is often used to explain Design Fiction, is only a medium with which the user is guided through the new world under a distinct perspective. Stories are not, as most commonly assume, the basis from which worlds are made. Instead, a world can be described as an entity whose internal structure can be accessed via several different 'entry points,’ or artefacts that represent different close-up sections of the world’s make-up.

Methods:

The Paper’s core research method revolves around the speculative design tradition, wherein researchers speculate upon possible scenarios using design. In this case, it is through the lens of Design Fiction.

The paper attempts to explain the questions (outlined above) through exploring the creation of two Design Fictions, Game of Drones and The Empathy Engine.

Results & Findings:

Through reflection upon the two projects, the paper argues that framing Design Fictions as ‘built worlds’ is more useful because, unlike, stories, the frame can be applied to all Design Fictions. The diegetic properties become the primary focus in Design Fiction, which means that building a world is the most important task for a designer when creating a Design Fiction, and each artefact, or ‘entry point,’ of that world is essentially the representation of that world but at a different scale.

In both Game of Drones and The Empathy Engine, each element represented an aspect of the fictional worlds at a different scale or perspective and maintained a mutual consistency and congruence with one another. This, the paper argues, is perhaps the main factor contributing to the illusion of reality the worlds conjured in their audiences.

Thus, it concludes that by applying world building to the concept of Design Fiction, it moves the focus away from storytelling to the cohesion of the world, which allows explorations into how things interact within that world. Therefore, Design Fiction can be defined as the map of a fictional world and narrative is only a means through which a person can explore said fictional world.

“30 Days in ActiveWorlds”

Core Research Ideas:

Virtual Reality, World-building, Community, Cyberterrorism, Living Lab, Collaborative Cyber-planning

Research Questions:

To observe and document the development of a virtual world from its beginning to end: looking at the growth and evolution of virtual communities and how people would interact or react in a world where there are no guidelines.

Key theories:

A ‘hook’ is necessary to attract users to a new world quickly and keep them invested in it. In any virgin land, there needs to be people to develop it, and by creating a building competition with a year’s worth of citizenship as a prize, the project managed to gather enough users (in such a short time, too) to bump it up to the third most popular world overnight.

A world without rules means that it is also allowing behaviour that would harm other users, as demonstrated by the cyber-terrorism incident (as early on as day 4) which forced Hudson-Smith to introduce laws - and even a police department - to protect the world.

In any world where there are a number of people regularly inhabiting the same space, a community inevitably grows and develops.

Method:

Living lab

Results & Findings:

Through documenting the development of a brand new world from its very beginning to its end, the paper maps the phenomena of world-building and community formation. On the surface, it showed that the division of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ became increasingly blurred the more invested one was in the world. However, it also provided an interesting insight into human behaviour: an example is the fact that we, despite the vastly different environment and circumstances that constitute a virtual reality, tend to follow what is known and believable: i.e. our own reality. From the buildings with toilets and stairs (even though it is highly impractical in ActiveWorld) to the unconscious mirroring of general behavioural and social patterns from actual reality, Hudson-Smith remarks upon the fact that it takes little for people to start recreating what they know to be ‘real.’

Furthermore, he describes the feeling of ‘being there’ as the sense that one had to be ‘there’ to truly appreciate being part of the world: essentially, it is the feeling of community involvement and excitement in the shared experience of building in a world which also had the potential to make history. He describes it as a feeling of ‘being home,’ and the traditional real-world community and family events like the singing of Christmas carols in a virtual world demonstrates this impression.

This paper also touches upon the potential downward spiral of a world without any laws, where it opens itself up to people who are willing to take advantage of its lawlessness to cause harm. Within four days of the world’s opening, a system of rules (and a police station to enforce these rules) had to be placed after a virtual terrorist attack crashed the main server.

Hudson-Smith, A. (2002). 30 Days in Active Worlds –Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World. In R. Schroeder (Ed.), The Social Life of Avatars (pp. 77-89). Springer.

Paul, C., Joseph, L., Miriam, S., & Mike, S. (2017). “Design Fiction as World Building,” Proceedings of the 3rd Biennial Research Through Design Conference, pp.164-179.

March 22nd, 2018
Tagged: paper review 
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