Always on the hunt for thought leaders who are thinking strategically about the future, I watched the video below last night and it sparked so many thoughts I was compelled to share it with you.
Bruce Sterling is one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. A prolific science fiction author, he is generally recognized as one of the world’s foremost visionary futurists. He also has a blog you should follow at Wired called, “Beyond the Beyond.”
In this talk at NEXT Berlin, “The leading European conference for the digital industry,” Sterling talks about design fiction, touts a firm called called superflux out of London (and Anab Jain has recreated her NEXT13 talk in blog post form, “Design for the New Normal“), and brings forth something a bit uncomfortable for anyone doing a startup: You are working to make VCs richer and not yourself.
What is ‘design fiction’? In this Slate interview Sterling sums it up as this:
It’s the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. The important word there is diegetic. It means you’re thinking very seriously about potential objects and services and trying to get people to concentrate on those rather than entire worlds or political trends or geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories.
Watch this and make a comment on what you think…
[youtube http://youtu.be/2VIoRYPZk68]