In the Bubble • John Thackara • 2005
On Social Fiction
In Short
Meaningful, sustainable interaction design should be rooted in aspects of everyday life, pursuing a kind of participatory social fiction, rather than a spectacular science fiction.
In Depth
A better innovation approach is to switch attention from science dominated futures to social fictions in which imagined new contacts enrich an otherwise familiar world. (p.219)
Thackara emphasizes that design is not just an exercise of abstract concepts, but needs to be rooted in everyday activities and situations to be successful and sustainable. It is social fiction, not science fiction.
He approaches this idea in a few different ways. Writing on the design of cities, he cites philosopher Ivan Illich and his ideas on human agency over a culture of consumption.
A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. (pp.75-76)
I see this comment as part of the same thread about social fiction over science fiction. Thackara uses the word “postspectacular” to indicate that sustainable, meaningful design facilitates participation in everyday life, over life-as-spectacle. He seems to feel this is an important message to highlight in the context of technology design, where interactions are usually designed to cast us as passive consumers.
In another section, Thackara recreates a list of “universals of culture” from anthropologist George P. Murdock, a set of phenomena or activities found to occur across multiple societies. He offers the list as a diverse categorization of everyday life that designers might use as a starting point for projects. I’m transcribing the whole list here because I find it a nice reminder to broaden our thinking on the possibilities for design (from p.134):
- Age grading
- Community organization
- Cooking
- Cooperative labour
- Cosmology
- Courtship
- Dancing
- Decorative art
- Divination
- Division of labour
- Dream interpretation
- Education
- Eschatology
- Ethics
- Ethno-botany
- Etiquette
- Faith healing
- Family feasting
- Fire making
- Folklore
- Food taboos
- Funeral rites
- Games
- Gestures
- Gift giving
- Government
- Greetings
- Hairstyles
- Hospitality
- Housing
- Hygiene
- Incest taboos
- Inheritance rules
- Joking
- Kin groups
- Kinship nomenclature
- Language
- Law
- Luck superstitions
- Magic
- Marriage
- Mealtimes
- Medicine
- Obstetrics
- Penal sanctions
- Personal names
- Population policy
- Postnatal care
- Pregnancy usages
- Property rights
- Propitiation of supernatural beings
- Puberty customs
- Religious rituals
- Residence rules
- Sexual restrictions
- Soul concepts
- Status differentiation
- Surgery
- Tool making
- Trade
- Visiting
- Weather control
- Weaving