Learning From Science Fiction

For more than a century, science fiction has been both the conscience and the subconscious of the technology industry. Its authors have invented new ideas that became world-changing technologies and they’ve shaped the moral, philosophical and aesthetic lenses that we use to understand our changing world. We use an interface from Minority Report to operate our Star Trek communicators, in order to communicate over geostationary satellites invented by Arthur C. Clarke, to visit William Gibson’s cyberspace and experience the drifting identities and psychological dislocation described by Philip K. Dick.

As a designer, technologist and artist, Greg Borenstein has mined science fiction for storytelling tools that help communicate how new technologies feel and what they might mean to our world. In this talk, Greg presents projects that show some of what he has learned and outline ideas that may come in handy in your own practice.

Presented at FITC Toronto 2014

Transcript

1. Learning from Science Fiction Greg Borenstein MIT Media Lab, Playful Systems
3. OpenCV for Processing github.com/atduskgreg
6. A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. — Fredrik Pohl
9. “The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color . . . She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes.”
18. thingiverse.com/thing:277787
19. Design Fiction vs. Science Fiction
20. “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” — Bruce Sterling
21. Keiichi Matsuda Domestic Robocop, 2010
22. Veronica Ranner Biophilia, 2011
23. Kevin Grennan Prototype Robot Armpit, 2011
24. BACKWARDS
25. BACKWARDS BEAUTIFUL BUT
26. Imagination -> Prediction ! Technology -> Storytelling
27. Technology -> Prediction ! Storytelling -> Imagination
28. Collaboration with John Powers 2H2K
29. 2H2K Artificial Labor
33. Supervised Learning
35. Martin Cuilla 1028 emails
53. All science fiction is really about the present. — Cory Doctorow
54. Sophia Brueckner Dan Novy
55. thanks. gregborenstein.com @atduskgreg