Anti-Solutionist Strategies: Seriously Silly Design Fiction

• Much of the academic and commercial work that seeks toinnovate around technology has been dismissed as“solutionist” because it solves problems that don’t exist orignores the complexity of personal, political andenvironmental issues. This paper traces the “solutionism”critique to its origins in city planning and highlights theoriginal concern with imaging and representation in thedesign process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to createcompelling and seductive images of concept designs, whichsell solutions and presume problems. We consider a rangeof strategies, which explicitly reject the search for“solutions”. These include design fiction and critical designbut also less well-known techniques, which aim forunuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present twoexamples of “magic machine” workshops whereparticipants are encouraged to reject realistic premises forpossible technological interventions and create absurdpropositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that suchpractices may help researchers resist the impulse towardssolutionism and suggest that attention to representationduring the ideation process is a key strategy for this.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Människa-datorinteraktion (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Human Computer Interaction (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Design fiction

well being

older people

Human-computer Interaction

Människa-datorinteraktion

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)