Experiencing Utopia. A Positive Approach to Design Fiction
This work offers an alternative method for design researchers and practitioners to explore future scenarios, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Design Fiction frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of Design Fiction's tendency towards dystopian speculations by proposing a positive approach that imagines, enacts, and evaluates utopia with participants, addressing critiques of negativity, contextlessness, elitist authorship, and missing evaluation methods.
Design Fiction is known for its provocative and often dystopian speculations about the future. In this paper, we present an alternative approach that focuses primarily on the positive. We propose to imagine, enact, and evaluate utopia with participants. By doing so, we react to four main critiques concerning Design Fiction: (1) its negativity, (2) its contextlessness, (3) its elitist authorship, and (4) its missing evaluation methods.