Referring again to the diagram below.

The products of tomorrow will be shaped and controlled by the emerging technologies of today. In their current state these technologies can be complex, chaotic, unkempt and unpredictable. Comfortable in the hands of the scientists and engineers responsible for their development but wholly unready and inappropriate for domestic application. The journey of a technology from the laboratory to the home is long and arduous but ultimately happens in quite predictable ways. The majority of products have a lineage that goes back through countless generations, each one a small iteration of the previous. By accepting this lineage, design fictions can do two things:

1. Project current emerging technological development to create Speculative Futures: Hypothetical products of tomorrow.

2. Break free of the lineage to speculate on Alternative Presents.

These fictions effectively act as cultural litmus paper, either offering tasters of how it might be to live with the technology in question or challenging contemporary applications of technology through demonstrable alternatives.

This presentation will focus on how these two types of fiction are created, how they differ from science fiction, other modes of future thinking and technological critique. More specifically how both methodologies utilise designed artefacts. What informs the development, aesthetics, behaviour, interactions and function of these objects? Once created, how and where do they operate? How can we gauge and understand their impact and meaning?

The conference will take place in Basel on 28/29 October.