This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory invented the interesting term " design fiction" -- but since I blog about it, people often ask me what, precisely, it is.

A formal definition exists: "Design fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change."


There's heavy freight in that sentence, but most can be disposed of promptly. "Deliberate use" means that design fiction is something that people do with a purpose. "Diegetic" is from film and theatre studies. A movie has a story, but it also has all the commentary, scene-setting, props, sets and gizmos to support that story. Design fiction doesn't tell stories -- instead, it designs prototypes that imply a changed world. "Suspending disbelief" means that design fiction has an ethics.

Design fictions are fakes of a theatrical sort, but they're not wicked frauds or hoaxes intended to rob or fool people. A design fiction is a creative act that puts the viewer into a different conceptual space -- for a while. Then it lets him go. Design fiction has an audience, not victims.

Read next Gallery: Patently untrue: fleshy defibrillators and synchronised baseball are changing the future Gallery Gallery: Patently untrue: fleshy defibrillators and synchronised baseball are changing the future

The Infinite Souvenir, by Bertrand Clerc, which is a "speculative product, designed and marketed by the nuclear industry" Steve Gallagher

Finally, there's the part about "change". Awareness of change is what distinguishes design fictions from jokes about technology, such as over-complex Heath Robinson machines or Japanese


chindogu ("weird tool") objects. Design fiction attacks the status quo and suggests clear ways in which life might become different.

So, with all that said, the obvious next question is: why would anyone do it? The answer there is quite simple, too: people do it because it became cheap and easy. The world hasn't lacked for prototype objects-of-the-future but, in the past, they were expensive to create and difficult to distribute. Commonly these used to be big, glossy TV ads from well-heeled corporations, or flashy sci-fi gizmos in a big-budget blockbuster movie.

Nowadays, a small creative team of design-school students can put together a pretty good internet video about a speculative project. If it's clever, catches the public eye and provokes some social-media virality, a design fiction can do useful things. It might land somebody a job interview or a speaking engagement at the local makerspace or hacklab. Or, who knows, it might even change the terms of debate about some aspect of technology and society.

What does Martian wine taste like? Carlos Monleon-Gendall aims to recreate the geophysical characteristics of the terrior Steve Gallagher


A design fiction is not real. This seems like a severe limitation. However, "real things" aren't absolutely and permanently real, either. Objects are designed, made, and then pass out of existence all the time.

The objects offered to us in a capitalist marketplace have three basic qualities: they are buildable, profitable and desirable. They have to be physically feasible, something that functions and works.

They need some business model that allows economic transactions.

And they have to provoke someone's consumer desire.

Outside of these strict requirements is a much larger space of potential objects. And those three basic limits all change with time. Through new technology, new things become buildable. Business models collapse or emerge from disruption. People are very fickle.

That's how it works out -- and the supposed distinction between "real" and "not-real" is pretty small.

Most patents are never manufactured. Most startups fail and vanish. Product advertisements are fantastic -- and full of blatant lies. Most military technologies are theatrical, there to scare and intimidate and overawe people, rather than to kill them with maximum efficiency. Companies

commonly launch "vapourware" campaigns that pledge to build things they have no intention of actually building. There's a lot of fantasy and pretence in all technologies.

People who are good at design fiction are very keen on these little weaknesses in the Emperor's New Clothes. The adept of design fiction comes to realise that every object, even a common fork or dad's boring tie, is "diegetic". They're all background props in some grander story.

Yosuke Ushigome has developed a world where war in the Korean peninsula is replaced by a sport, "Synchronised baseball" Steve Gallagher

A fork exists so that aristocrats could avoid staining their fingers with gravy. The fork is a tool for class distinction. We use forks today not because forks are "practical", but because we're a feudal society that became democratic. Dad's boring tie was originally a Croatian "cravat" -- a coloured war scarf around the neck of a Balkan cavalryman. Ties are said to have been imported into Britain by Charles II when he returned from his exile in France, having picked up the fashion from Croatian mercenaries in the service of Louis XIII. That story is quite exotic, far-fetched and amazing -- but who cares? Ties are still boring, even despite the rhetorical stunt I just pulled where I made them seem amazing for a while.

Design fiction plays games with these transitions of the amazing and the boring, the transitions of the believable and the incredible.


If you understand that -- and if you know a lot about design, and also something about internet razzle-dazzle -- you can really mess with people's heads nowadays. With design fiction you can pull coins from their ears and rabbits out of their hats.

Who couldn't like that?

Bruce Sterling is an author and cyberpunk pioneer.