This special issue of Digital Creativity invites papers, projects and reviews exploring and developing the notion of Design Fictions. One of the early proponents of Design Fictions, the author Bruce Sterling, said that design: “seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls – scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design” (Sterling, 2009). Despite the current burgeoning of this field and its various histories and antecedents, the coming together of design and fiction, as ‘design fictions’, remains relatively underexplored.
Design Fictions might also be sensed as a ‘speculative turn’ in design practice, founding a new engagement in ‘prototyping’ conjectural projections of designed futures. In the context of ever-present near futures, projected as scenarios that threaten radical ruptures of the real, digital creativity expands into a post-digital cybernetics. Design Fictions speculative design methodologies take their cue from science fiction, Sterling however would also have it the other way around, saying that: “design and literature don't talk together much, but design has more to offer literature at the moment than literature can offer design” (Sterling, 2009).
This issue seeks to put design and literature into conversation. The journal wishes to ask how Design Fictions and related methodological work have mutated or glitched across art, design and architecture, for example in response to ‘design fictions’ (Nokia/Bleecker); the ‘critical design’ (Dunne and Raby); in speculative and visionary architecture (Spiller); science fiction as prototyping (Intel/Johnson); and ethnographic work on design and prototyping (Kelty). Papers are invited from three broad areas:
| • | Papers offering critical reflections on post-digital futures rendered as Design Fictions. | ||||
| • | Papers that illustrate what contemporary design provides as an alternative to the structural orthodoxies of mappings of the ‘hard’ science fictional to the ‘engineering of creativity’ (Altshuller). | ||||
| • | Papers that reflect on Design Fictions as a methodology and on the ways in which fictional constructs and diegetic prototypes might open design discourse on cybernetic futures. | ||||
Initial proposals should be extended abstracts in English, between 800-1200 words. The categories for final submission are Short Papers between 2500-3500 words, and Long Papers, between 5000-7000 words. The papers will be selected through a blind peer review process. Upon acceptance of the abstract, you will be sent further authors' guidelines based on the Digital Creativity guidelines (Instructions for Authors) at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/NDCR.
The extended abstract should include the following information: 1) Name of author(s) with email addresses and affiliation, if applicable 2) Title of the paper 3) Body of the abstract 4) Preliminary bibliography 5) Author(s)'s short bio(s) 6) Indication of whether the submission will be a short or a long paper.
Important dates:
Initial proposals (extended abstracts) deadline: 5 March 2012
Notification of extended abstract acceptance (by editors' review): 26 March 2012
Final papers are due on: 4 June 2012
Blind peer-reviews due on: 30 July 2012
Revised final papers are due on: 3 September 2012
Special issue published: December 2012
Recipients: Please forward your abstract as a PDF attachment in an e-mail addressed to the special issue and Digital Creativity editors below:
Derek Hales, special issue quest editor [email protected]>
Digital Creativity editors <[email protected]