Dunne and Raby, “Technological Dream Series No. 1: Robots,” 2007, By Bruce Sterling
[Video Link] I first witnessed this strange Dunne and Raby video…. well, I feel sure that it was more than five years ago, but I don’t see how that’s possible.Some experiences squeeze the past into a different shape.
This video seems pretty opaque, at first encounter. It has no credits. The heroine is mute, nameless, rather elegant, very worried and dressed in black. The soundtrack is wordless electronic gabbling, warbling and scratching. The set is pure gallery white-space, devoid of doors, walls, sinks, beds, stoves or toilets. Odd, meaningless objects are strewn across the floor.
There are some jarring, horror-film jump-cuts, but they lack an apparent purpose. The nonexistent plot never advances. No conflict is settled. No problem is solved. No conclusion is reached. There’s no moral to this story. There’s no story.
“Technological Dream Series” is not even a “series,” because there was only one of them. “Technological Dream Series” is a demo.
This demo looks something like science fiction — that’s why it captured my attention right away, and has held it for years now — but “Technological Dream Series” is not science fiction. It’s a different thing, because it’s “design fiction.”
“Technological Dream Series No. 1: Robots” is a demo, and the subject being demonstrated is interaction. These products on display, the objects, the “robots” –they’re as abstract as chess-pieces. They’re not like the designed products that star in commercial ads, they’re not glossed-up, they don’t have branding, they’re not for sale. The heroine isn’t the star, either. The star is the interaction.
Once you can grasp the intention of the creators — they want you to think about user interaction, they’re trying to show you how it works, how it might work — then, the film’s quite straightforward. The user — she’s very London, all black-clad, spooky, alterna-rock and high heels — is tending to the urgent needs of her devices.
Her possessions are not today’s dysfunctional, needy mobiles and/or laptops, but tomorrow’s dysfunctional, needy “robots” (or, well, whatever those entities are). Like our own rather messed-up tech devices, her robots are pretty far from optimal. Even though she probably can’t live without them, and is obviously very concerned about them, these things she owns are not exactly on her side. It’s a tense, fraught relationship.
Any aware person nowadays, who is logging-on to Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft, must surely sense that they are intimately kissing-up to vast, cool, HGWellsian, Martianly unsympathetic entities that are slowly and surely drawing up their own plans. You know that’s true, right? That’s not sci-fi, that’s just how life is now. Now imagine that these vast, quasi-intelligent corporate entities were boiled down to red circles that oozed nervously around your living room.
For our user-protagonist here, that’s life. She’s co-existing, every day, with “robots” that are glitchy, itchy and so problem-ridden as to manifest emotional neurosis. They are her pets, her spies, her commensal entities, but their inner workings are as remote as the control rooms of Martian tripods.
All this user can do is attempt to humanely empathize with these stricken creatures of her household. They are her darlings: the red ring, the black rolling cone, the pull-toy and the crooked security scanner. She’s like an overtaxed new mother. Her love for these quadruplets come at a steep cost to her own sanity.
Science fiction stories have explored this line of thought before. The written sci-fi equivalent of “Technological Dream Series No. 1” would be a rather similar British work of the imagination, “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” by J. G. Ballard. Written way back in 1962, this science fiction tale is about the luckless inhabitant of a computerized “psychotropic” house. Since it’s by Ballard, it’s a pretty good story.
This house, “Stellavista,” goes murderously nuts in the typical Ballardian atmosphere of artsy anomie and implacable obsession — but despite Ballard’s fine verbiage, we’re never really shown that house, “Stellavista.” Stellavista is described, but never demonstrated. We don’t get hands-on with it. A written science fiction story is and must remain a verbal composition.
By contrast, “Technological Dream” conveys its “cognitive estrangement” in a quieter, gentler fashion. That’s because designers are not authors. An author of fiction is an entertainer, he’s deceiving, beguiling and head-tripping the reader — he’s commonly locked in a private, intimate, psychic single-combat with the reader. Written fiction is all about thrills, twists, surprising revelations, page-turning hooks, and similar bulky, time-consuming forms of ideational overhead.
Designers don’t have readers, designers have users. So “Technological Dream” doesn’t stretch for a dramatic climax, nor does it hammer any point home. A written story must offer a summary ending, but design lacks any written narrative that ends. Science fiction commonly ends in lessons, warnings, pep-talks or evocations, but a design fiction is an intervention, a provocation, an invitation to join an ongoing debate.
What if our machines were too mysterious to understand, but also intimates that we saw every day? What if we couldn’t live with them, and they couldn’t function without us? What if, what if….
There’s never been a “Technological Dream Series No. 2.” Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby never extended this “series.” Their imaginary-robot models were swiftly inducted into the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with the video itself.
I’d surmise that Tony and Fiona, like most designers, were adapting themselves to the explicit needs of their user-base. If some client had demanded “Series No. 2” from them, they would have obligingly built and filmed that, but they’re designers, so it’s not like they feel some gabby, writerly compulsion to churn these things out. They do write some books — Hertzian Tales is particularly startling — but they don’t write fiction, and those “tales” aren’t really tales at all — they’re design documentations, descriptions of design approaches, elucidations of design thinking.
“Design Fiction” is not a form of fiction written about design. Design fiction is a form of design — it’s the design of objects and services that are imaginary. It’s design that uses cheap, fast, viral media to spread itself around — to provoke speculation, to extrapolate, and to criticize. “Design fictions” exist outside the stifling limits of the retail box-store. They are designs, but they are metaphysical, theoretical, technical, cultural, artistic, seductive, fertile and consolatory.
“Design fiction” does important work in spaces where fiction is clumsy, and where science has little to say: the user-centricity, the creative passion for the shapes of things, the engagement with the grain of the material.
This modest little video made me realize that a new approach, a new creative force, had appeared within the domain of the imagination. It’s a different way to do “what if.” Design fiction expanded my worldview, and gave me a new set of tools with which to engage with the world around me.
It’s common to say that your life should be improved by design, but my life was improved by Dunne and Raby “critical design.” The shape of things will never be the same.