We worked with the design and curatorial team at the V&A to produce six films for their landmark show The Future Starts Here which opened on 12th May. From a film about how smart objects in a home might become protagonists to the ecologies of technological networks, mass protests to cryonic preservations – our films bring social, cultural and environmental context to the objects and technologies being displayed.

Open to the public until 4 November 2018; this exhibition is composed of more than 100 objects: a landscape of possibilities for a not-too-distant future.

The ‘Networks’ film was conceived, directed, and produced by Superflux. We also gratefully included edited excerpts from the following footage under Creative Commons License BY 3.0 

‘Pennies for iPhone’ courtesy of Pennies for iPhone

‘Snapchat | Snapchatter’ courtesy of Adam Rozanski

‘CONNECT APP VIDEO english’ courtesy of Matthias Franta

‘The TripAdvisor App = Hello, Travel Superpowers’ courtesy of Tripadvisor

‘Pilsen Callao – Día del Amigo’ courtesy of Giancarlo Quito

‘Aruba Global Cloud Data Center – Home of your data, heart of your business’ courtesy of Aruba

‘Self-driving cars. Detecting and tracking vehicles’ courtesy of David del Río Medina

‘2017 Infiniti Q60 semi autonomous Test Drive’ courtesy of Javier Mota

‘Chixoy Dam: A Retrospective Study’ courtesy of Daniele Profeta

‘Cortana’s Angels – A Tale of Three CEOs’ courtesy of Toon Poorter

‘Shenzhen Capacitor Factory’ courtesy of Miles Goodhew

‘We Call Them Intruders: A Documentary about Canadian Mining in Africa’ courtesy of ‘We Call Them Intruders’

‘When mines fuel conflict’ courtesy of IOM – UN Migration

‘Hong Kong – Kowloon Tong Festival Walk – Apple Store Grand Opening 2012-09-29’ courtesy of gigapeterz

‘Telefonica Mitwelt Imagespot’ courtesy of QXXQ Studios

‘Opening Apple Store Haarlem’ courtesy of One More Thing

‘The opening of the Apple Store in Amsterdam (Netherlands)’ courtesy of eatingaltoids

‘Apple Store Passeig de Gràcia Opening Day Entrance and Walkthrough’ courtesy of mattconfidential

‘3h29m40s10f China iPhone Manufacturing Montage – Wipe to USA – TR2016a’ courtesy of Gordon McDowell

‘Travis Scott w/ Quavo – Pick up the Phone – LIVE @ COMPLEXCON2016 – 11.5.2016’ courtesy of glenjamn3

‘Reel 2018’ courtesy of Pierre Roquet

‘15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 minutes’ courtesy of Timo Bingmann

‘#YaMeCanse bajo ataque de bots’ courtesy of LoQueSigueTV

‘Visualisation of SoundCloud activity’ courtesy of CeRch KCL

‘DATI.GOV.IT Open Data Visualization’ courtesy of SciamLab

‘Leap points Cloud’ courtesy of Mohamed Ikbel Boulabiar

‘Mining farm and cooling system for cryptocurrencies’ courtesy of Crypto Man

‘How Smartphones Are Assembled & Manufactured In China’ courtesy of Trakin Tech

‘Aerial Shot of Busy Highway’ courtesy of Storyfootage

‘THL Smartphone Factory China’ courtesy of THL Smartphone Factory China

‘Wodify Mobile App’ courtesy of Wodify

‘Social Network Stock footage’ courtesy of the Lab Bench

This film includes edited excerpts from the following footage under the Videvo License:

‘Commuters Using Smartphones’ courtesy of Videvo Attribution License

A big thank you to all those who shared the following copyrighted material, which was also included in the ‘Networks’ film:

‘Taiwan from the Air’ footage courtesy of Ching-Yen Chiu

‘Xtera’s Branching Unit Sea Trial (Above the Arctic Circle)’ Footage courtesy of Copyright & Proprietary 

‘Facebook Data Center Drone Flyover’ courtesy of Mike Murray / The Geek Pub, LLC

‘Apple Data Center Solar Farm – Aerial view’ courtesy of Gerald Waller

‘Coltan: Conflict minerals in Congo’ courtesy of Roland Brockmann and MISEREOR

‘Bitcoin valley’ images courtesy of Patrick Cavan Brown

“The Internet Architecture. Data Center” Documentary’ courtesy of 

‘Makai Submarine Cable Lay Animation’ courtesy of Makai Ocean Engineering, Inc. Hawaii, USA +1-808-259-8871 • makai@makai.com

‘Conflict Minerals’ images courtesy of Mark Craemer

‘Large, open-pit iron ore mine showing the various layers of soil and iron rich ore, industrial exterior, ore mining quarry, sunny day, summer, mining of iron’ courtesy of Igor Bay

‘Large Touch Screen Panel of Mobile Phone. Close up of the production line of large touch screen LCD module transporting one by one.’ used under license from Daumiu – stock.adobe.com

‘Touch Screen Production. Production line of touch screen of mobile phone. Applying glue to stick the touch screen film to the glass module.’ video used under license from Daumiu – stock.adobe.com

‘Highway and Self Driving Autopilot Autonomous Cars 4K’ video by bonjansen – stock.adobe.com

‘Self-driving, autonomous car simulation’ video used under license from hi_def_animation – stock.adobe.com

“I’m getting paid to heat my house while Bitcoin mining and altcoin mining” courtesy of Rahdi Fakhoury (The Bitcoin Miner)

‘Electronics Manufacturing – Factory workers assembling circuit boards’ from skywardkick

‘Electronic PCB boards manufactured for export, China’ from Spotmatik

‘Abandoned old copper extraction Sao Domingos Mine, Portugal, aerial view’ from Discovod

‘New And Old Copper mines’ from Skyworks

‘Religious crowd praising’ by Patrick Guénette

‘Kiev, UKRAINE – June 19, 2014’ from SMP

‘The Ghost hydroelectric dam and reservoir on the Bow River, Alberta, Canada’ from skylightpictures

‘4K aerial hydro electric dam oabove view’ by Red Dog Digital ‘4K aerial close up water dam beauty and power’ by Red Dog Digital

‘Bitcoin mining seamless loop’ from imaginima

‘Miner life review’ courtesy of Jared, Digital Gold LLC
https://www.youtube.com/c/digitalgold

‘Product test with facial recognition of emotions’ courtesy of Emotion Research Lab

‘Udacity SDC Project 5: project video final’ courtesy of John Chen

We have had a busy and productive summer working with clients old and new on some exciting projects. From government strategy and futures with the Moldovian State Chancellory, UN agencies, to AI futures with Mozilla. We’ve also been toiling away preparing for the unveiling of our new project Mitigation of Shock for the exhibition After the End of the World at the CCCB in two weeks time. But thats not all…

We have made a new version of our Buggy Air air pollution sensing kit, which is a continued collaboration between Hugh Knowles from Friends of the Earth, IoTA Academy, Virtual Technologies, ScienceScope and ourselves. The device will be shown for the first time between 19th – 24th September at the Design Frontiers exhibition as part of the London Design Festival at Somerset House.

We are looking to expand our network of comrades and collaborators who would be interested in working with us on projects from work with external clients to self-initiated adventures. At the moment we’re looking to build relationships with following folks:

Spring has sprung, and here at the studio we’re in full bloom. Check out what we’ve been up to, and find out what we’ve got coming up over the next few months.

It’s the end of January already and as the year starts to heat up, we’re momentarily looking backwards to review the work and activities of the year gone by. 2016 was an equally challenging and rewarding year for the studio. In the autumn we moved into our new studio space at Somerset House Studios and have been firing on all cylinders ever since.

But before we go into a proper review, the best news: We have just launched our new identity, and website! With huge thanks to Superscript² for visual identity and branding, Sonia Dominguez for web design, toutenpixel for web development, Geetika Alok for colour advise, Tim Maughan for wordsmithing advice, Marianna for the comms, and Vytas for the tremendous project management. We will continue fixing bugs so all feedback welcome. 

Intro by Anab Jain:

Last year we were lucky to have some fantastic guest posts from Paul Graham Raven, Scott Smith and Christina Agapakis. Continuing the tradition into our second year, I am thrilled to welcome Alexis Lloyd, Creative Director R&D New York Times, to our blog with a great essay. When I met Alexis last year, it was clear that there were crossovers in our work, and we are grateful that she agreed to write for us, brilliantly exploring a space that we are currently preoccupied with in the studio. Over to Alexis.

IN THE LOOP: DESIGNING CONVERSATIONS WITH ALGORITHMS 

Earlier this year, I saw a video from the Consumer Electronics Show in which Whirlpool gave a demonstration of their new line of connected appliances: appliances which would purportedly engage in tightly choreographed routines in order to respond easily and seamlessly to the consumer’s every need. As I watched, it struck me how similar the notions were to the “kitchen of the future” touted by Walter Cronkite in this 1967 video. I began to wonder: was that future vision from nearly fifty years ago particularly prescient? Or, perhaps, are we continuing to model technological innovation on a set of values that hasn’t changed in decades?

When we look closely at the implicit values embedded in the vast majority of new consumer technologies, they speak to a particular kind of relationship we are expected to have with computational systems, a relationship that harkens back to mid-20th century visions of robot servants. These relationships are defined by efficiency, optimization, and apparent magic. Products and systems are designed to relieve users of a variety of everyday “burdens” — problems that are often prioritized according to what technology can solve rather than their significance or impact. And those systems are then assumed to “just work”, in the famous words of Apple. They are black boxes in which the consumer should never feel the need to look under the hood, to see or examine a system’s process, because it should be smart enough to always anticipate your needs.

So what’s wrong with this vision? Why wouldn’t I want things doing work for me? Why would I care to understand more about a system’s process when it just makes the right decisions for me?

The problem is that these systems are making decisions on my behalf and those decisions are not always optimal: they can be based on wrong assumptions, incomplete understanding, or erroneous input. And as those systems become more pervasive, getting it wrong becomes increasingly problematic. We are starting to realize that black boxes are insufficient, because these systems are never smart enough to do what I expect all the time, or I want them to do something that wasn’t explicitly designed into the system, or one “smart” thing disagrees with another “smart” thing. And the decisions they make are not trivial. Algorithmic systems record and influence an ever-increasing number of facets of our lives: the media we consume, through recommendation algorithms and personalized search; what my health insurance knows about my physical status, the kinds of places I’m exposed to (or not exposed to) as I navigate through the world; whether I’m approved for loans or hired for jobs; and whom I may date or marry.

As algorithmic systems become more prevalent, I’ve begun to notice of a variety of emergent behaviors evolving to work around these constraints, to deal with the insufficiency of these black box systems. These behaviors point to a growing dissatisfaction with the predominant design principles, and imply a new posture towards our relationships with machines.

Image: Adspiration

The first behavior is adaptation. These are situations where I bend to the system’s will. For example, adaptations to the shortcomings of voice UI systems — mispronouncing a friend’s name to get my phone to call them; overenunciating; or speaking in a different accent because of the cultural assumptions built into voice recognition. We see people contort their behavior to perform for the system so that it responds optimally. This is compliance, an acknowledgement that we understand how a system listens, even when it’s not doing what we expect. We know that it isn’t flexible or responsive enough, so we shape ourselves to it. If this is the way we move forward, do half of us end up with Google accents and the other half with Apple accents? How much of our culture ends up being an adaptation to systems we can’t communicate well with?

NEGOTIATION

The second type of behavior we’re seeing is negotiation — strategies for engaging  with a system to operate within it in more nuanced ways. One example of this is Ghostery, a browser extension that allows one to see what data is being tracked from one’s web browsing and limit it or shape it according to one’s desires. This represents a middle ground: a system that is intended to be opaque is being probed in order to see what it does and try and work with it better. In these negotiations, users force a system to be more visible and flexible so that they can better converse with it.

We also see this kind of probing of algorithms becoming a new and critical role in journalism, as newsrooms take it upon themselves to independently investigate systems through impulse response modeling and reverse engineering, whether it’s looking at the words that search engines censor from their autocomplete suggestions, how online retailers dynamically target different prices to different users, or how political campaigns generate fundraising emails.

Antagonism

Third, rather than bending to the system or trying to better converse with it, some take an antagonistic stance: they break the system to assert their will. Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle is one example of this approach, where people hack their hair and makeup in order to foil computer vision and opt out of participating in facial recognition systems. What’s interesting here is that, while the attitude here is antagonistic, it is also an extreme acknowledgement of a system’s power — understanding that one must alter one’s identity and appearance in order to simply exert free will in an interaction.

Rather than simply seeing these behaviors as a series of exploits or hacks, I see them as signals of a changing posture towards computational systems. Culturally, we are now familiar enough with computational logic that we can conceive of the computer as a subject, an actor with a controlled set of perceptions and decision processes. And so we are beginning to create relationships where we form mental models of the system’s subjective experience and we respond to that in various ways. Rather than seeing those systems as tools, or servants, or invisible masters, we have begun to understand them as empowered actors in a flat ontology of people, devices, software, and data, where our voice is one signal in a complex network of operations. And we are not at the center of this network. Sensing and computational algorithms are continuously running in the background of our lives. We tap into them as needed, but they are not there purely in service of the end user, but also in service of corporate goals, group needs, civic order, black markets, advertising, and more. People are becoming human nodes on a heterogeneous, ubiquitous and distributed network. This fundamentally changes our relationship with technology and information.

However, interactions and user interfaces are still designed so that users see themselves at the center of the network and the underlying complexity is abstracted away. In this process of simplification, we are abstracting ourselves out of many important conversations and in doing so, are disenfranchising ourselves.

Julian Oliver states this problem well, saying: “Our inability to describe and understand [technological infrastructure] reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable. Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it. ‘The Cloud’ is a good example of a dangerous simplification at work, akin to a children’s book.”

So, what I advocate is designing interactions that acknowledge the peer-like status these systems now have in our lives. Interactions where we don’t shield ourselves from complexity but actively engage with it. And in order to engage with it, the conduits for those negotiations need to be accessible not only to experts and hackers but to the average user as well. We need to give our users more respect and provide them with more information so that they can start to have empowered dialogues with the pervasive systems around them.

This is obviously not a simple proposition, so we start with: what are the counterpart values? What’s the alternative to the black box, what’s the alternative to “it just works”? What design principles should we building into new interactions?

Transparency

The first is transparency. In order to be able to engage in a fruitful interaction with a system, I need to be able to understand something about its decision-making process. And I want to be clear that transparency doesn’t mean complete visibility, it doesn’t mean showing me every data packet sent or every decision tree. I say that because, in many discussions about algorithmic transparency, people have a tendency to throw their hands up, claiming that algorithmic systems have become so complex that we don’t even fully understand what they’re doing, so of course we can’t explain them to the user. I find this argument reductive and think it misunderstands what transparency entails in the context of interaction design.

As an analogy, when I have a conversation with a friend, I don’t know his whole psychological history or every factor that goes into his responses, let alone what’s happening at a neurological or chemical level, but I understand something about who he is and how he operates. I have enough signals to participate and give feedback — and more importantly, I trust that he will share information that is necessary and relevant to our conversation. Between us, we have the tools to delve into the places where our communication breaks down, identify those problems and recalibrate our interaction. Transparency is necessary to facilitate this kind of conversational relationship with algorithms. It serves to establish trust that a system is showing me what I need to know and is not doing anything I don’t want it to with my participation or data; and that it is giving me the necessary knowledge and input to correct a system when it’s wrong.

We’re starting to see some very nascent examples of this, like the functionality that both Amazon and Netflix have, where I can see the assumptions that are being made by a recommendation system and I am offered a way to give negative feedback; to tell Amazon when it’s wrong and why. It definitely still feels clunky — it’s not a very complex or nuanced conversation yet, but it’s a step in the right direction.

More broadly, the challenge we’re facing has a lot to do with the shift from mechanical systems to digital ones. Mechanical systems have a degree of transparency in that their form necessarily reveals their function and gives us signals about what they’re doing. Digital systems don’t implicitly reveal their processes, and so it is a relatively new state that designers now bear the burden of making those processes visible and available to interrogate.

Agency

The second principle here is agency, meaning that a system’s design should empower users to not only accomplish tasks, but should also convey a sense that they are in control of their participation with a system at any moment. And I want to be clear that agency is different from absolute and granular control.

This interface, for example, gives us an enormous amount of precise control, but for anyone but an expert, probably not much sense of agency.

A car, on the other hand, is a good illustration of agency. There’s plenty of “smart” stuff that the car is doing for me, that I can’t directly adjust — I can’t control how electricity is routed or which piston fires when, but I can intervene at any time to control my experience. I have clear inputs to steer, stop, speed up, or slow down and I generally feel that the car is working at my behest.

Virtuosity

The last principle, virtuosity, is something that usually comes as a result of systems that support agency and transparency well. And when I say virtuosity, what I mean is the ability to use a technology expressively.

A technology allows for virtuosity when it contains affordances for all kinds of skilled techniques that can become deeply embedded into processes and cultures. It’s not just about being able to adapt something to one’s needs, but to “play” a system with skill and expressiveness. This is what I think we should aspire to. While it’s wonderful if technology makes our lives easier or more efficient, at its best it is far more than that. It gives us new superpowers, new channels for expression and communication that can be far more than utilitarian — they can allow for true eloquence. We need to design interactions that allow us to converse across complex networks, where we can understand and engage in informed and thoughtful ways, and the systems around us can respond with equal nuance.

These values deeply inform the work we do in The New York Times R&D Lab, whether we are exploring new kinds of environmental computing interfaces that respond across multiple systems, creating wearables that punctuate offline conversations with one’s online interests, or developing best practices for how we manage and apply our readers’ data. By doing research to understand the technological and behavioral signals of change around us, we can then build and imagine futures that best serve our users, our company, and our industry.

About the Author: Alexis Lloyd is the Creative Director of the Research and Development Lab at the New York Times where she investigates technology trends and prototypes future concepts for content delivery. Follow on twitter @alexislloyd. 

Continuing with our series of guest posts on the blog, we invited Scott Smith to share his thoughts on the notion of ‘superdensity’, something he has talked about in the past. Scott kindly agreed, and today we are delighted to share his brilliant reponse.

It’s the Future. Take an Umbrella.

About two and a half years ago, I wrote a blog post titled “The Future is Here Today, and It’s Superdense“. The phrasing was a reference to the apocryphal William Gibson phrase that’s a frequent crutch for people speaking prospectively in public fora: “the future is here today, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The trigger for the post was a cascade of world events that made “normal” a fairly useless construction—the Arab Spring was unfolding, the Euro crisis was in full swing, and oh, Japan had been laid low by a triple-whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

My intent in describing it as superdense, something typically used to talk about neutron stars or quantum information theory, was to find a way to describe how the typical Gibsonian loose distribution of future drivers and emergent trends was momentarily compacting into a tightly clustered ball of WTF. What we think of as the future, in particular bits of dystopia and chaos, wasn’t hiding in bits and pieces under this bush or over in that desert, but was all happening at once, or so it felt.

I also wanted to get across the sense of condensation—of various threads and elements, some connected, some not, coming together in a fairly knotty but spectacular way. While the tragedies in Japan were in some sense of a chain of causation (earthquake causing tsunami causing reactor damage), the events in the Arab world and the Euro crisis were in some ways quite connected via the sensitivities of the economic markets, political weaknesses and so on.

One could say—to keep piling on metaphors—a variety of chickens were coming home to roost. Others have talked about this period of protracted superdensity as a New Normal, where the general social, technological, economic, political and environmental conditions we had previously taken for granted no longer seem to pertain. In this period of deep flux, new power structures are emergent.

So far, so good. We’ve found various bits of language to describe the state we feel we’re in, but we don’t have a good system for coding and signaling the changes in state we experience, particularly as it applies to us as individuals, or to where we live or frame our existence (to our communities, economies, networks, etc). How fast is x changing in relation to me? To others? How strong is a particular driver, trend or state at this moment, and will it change? One person’s weird may be another’s normal, for example. From Chittagong in Bangladesh, for example, a hurricane and technological blackout in the New York metropolitan area might seem like seem a more normal distribution (though certainly not wished upon others).

Occasionally, when trying characterize the dynamic, often changeable nature of the future, I’ve resorted, unscripted to meteorological metaphors, describing how what we think of as “the future” as a phenomenon that washes over us from time to time like a storm front, full of pressure changes, turbulence, and with occasional destructive force. We talk about trends as parts of particular futures, as “building,” “gaining strength” or “rising,” for example. Fans of “Game of Thrones” speak cryptically online about how “winter is coming” as a means of characterizing what they see as a long-term shift toward instability or stagnation. The New Normal is, in effect a kind of climate change metaphor, conveying an expectation that conditions under which we’ve made assumptions and decisions in the past—or even the whole physics model of our reality—has altered in a fundamental way. Temperature, precipitation, humidity are all out of whack in our decision-making models.

As I sit thinking about this problem, a familiar sound comes on the streamed radio station to which I’m listening: the audio cue that tells me it’s time for the Shipping Forecast. If you aren’t familiar with it, the Shipping Forecast is generated by Britain’s Met Office and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at four intervals during the day. The Forecast splits the seas surrounding the UK and Ireland into 31 areas, reaching as far northwest as Iceland, east to Norway and Denmark, and south along the Continent to Spain and Portugal, and provides updated weather and sea conditions in these zones to guide both commercial and private shipping as it makes its way to and fro within the area. Similar forecast frameworks are used by other countries, with similar structures.

Many people, sailors and civilians alike, speak about the Shipping Forecast as having a sort of mythical quality—with evocative if slightly opaque names for the regions like Fastnet, Forties, Rockall and German Bight conjuring up something otherworldly, recognized but exotic. Announcers delivering the broadcast read out a standard format of information from each region: regarding wind speeds and direction, air pressure and tracking, precipitation, and so on. While the data sounds almost like a numbers station, it’s meaningful to those who use it, and from it one can create a very precise map of pressure across thousands of square miles of sea. The Shipping Forecast is a powerful shorthand that lets navigators know what to expect, how fast change is occurring, and in which direction it is moving.

Image credit: http://simonholliday.com/shippingforecast/trends

Would something like this be desirable as a means of navigating the New Normal? For understanding how to anticipate superdensity, and even to ride its kinetic energy? I wonder if what we need is a Shipping Forecast for futures—sliced into topical regions, with key forces identified, metrics described, and possible trajectories plotted? “Solar energy, veering 6 to 7, backing 3 later based on pending regulation, sporadic innovation, moderate to good.” “Surveillance, severe gale 9 to violent storm 11, hacking, squalls later, poor, becoming moderate later.” “Bioprinting, 3 to 4, fog, clearing later.”

As with many forecasts, the data is similar but the outcomes vary based on your position relative to the forces at play. Are you in a big or small craft, so to speak? Vulnerable, or protected? Is turbulence your friend or enemy? The standard language of the Shipping Forecast is interpretable by all, but value is variable depending on who or what you are, and where you stand, sit or sail, much like the security warnings we’ve grown weary of in recent years, with their orange/yellow/reds.

So, I make the modest proposal: let’s develop a Shipping Forecast for the sort of weird, New Normal futures we increasingly encounter. I’m sure we can come up with 30-odd social and economic issues, emerging technologies or environmental trends that we can all agree need tracking. Monitored by an appointed body (a Future Measurement Agency?), these factors can be reduced to publicly digestible metrics, and delivered in a daily report via print, radio and Internet.

Wondering whether Iran’s opening to the West is about to set off a chain reaction of international political reconfigurations? Want to know whether that new biotech product is an immediate gamechanger or just a slow burn? Is a new pandemic something to be concerned about? Tune in each night before bed, get a snapshot view of the future through the glow of your tablet,  or a rip-and-read ticker tape via your mini-printer.

I’ll admit, it sounds a little strange, and yet we’ve spent far, far more time, money and effort developing sophisticated social media analytics, high-powered dashboards that allow financial traders at a glance views of market microturbulence, and, as we’ve found out recently, all-consuming social graphs of all of our interactions and connections. Why not, then, provide such metamaps of “future-weather” as a public good? Widespread knowledge of imminent turbulence and (dare I re-appropriate the word) actual disruption might go a long way toward connecting our actions and reactions to wider conditions.

Unlike the actual Shipping Forecast, to which sailors and ship captains can only respond in a reactive fashion, the forecasting model I propose is actually a feedback loop of sorts—a sort of Quantified Self for society. No, we can’t control (all) earthquakes, but there is a lot of the near-future that is in our control—if we can reconnect our conscious lives to causation. We may choose not to shape the waves coming at us—which is always an option in the decision-making process—but if we are going to apply so much of our time and effort to collecting data and crafting visualisations, surely this little experiment isn’t asking too much.

About the Author: Scott Smith is a critical futurist, strategic designer, researcher, writer, guerrilla educator and founder of Changeist. Follow on Twitter @changeist. 

We recently finished a project Dynamic Genetics vs. Mann exploring the implications of synthetic biology and genomics in the context of future healthcare. We are thrilled to have Christina Agapakis reflect on the project in the context of genomic prediction, privacy, and piracy.

This is me

What if personalized medicine never happens? What if the promised therapies tailored to our unique genomes just never materialize? Although it seems inevitable, there is no guarantee that we will be able to precisely match treatments to individuals. For complex diseases with many associated genes interacting in changing environments, the statistical power to make therapeutic predictions currently remains elusive. What if we sequence the genome of every single person on earth and the data is still not big enough?

In such a future, will we still believe in genomic promises? Perhaps, unable to let go of the hope that our genes can predict our future health, we continue to demand access to our largely uninformative genetic code. Unable to find strong associations for complex and chronic diseases but still desperate for determinism, we might look for answers not only in the genes of our own cells but the genes of our microbial symbionts.

This hope might remain part of medical rituals, a statistical placebo for the post-genomic checkup. The doctor takes samples of your secretions and sends them to a genome sequencing company, the costs barely a blip on otherwise ballooning medical bills. You talk about your fears of aging, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, antibiotic resistant bacteria. You discuss your parents and grandparents’ medical history. Your blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar are measured. Risks are calculated. You should probably lose some weight, eat more vegetables, walk more. You should smoke less, eat less processed food, less sugar. You should take better care of yourself. You probably should have done this anyway. You go home with a reassuring list of percentages that put a number on the fundamental uncertainty about your future.

The sequencing company analyzes your DNA, bills your insurance company, and stores your data in the cloud. Your demographic information and health records are linked to your unique set of sequence variations. Associations are identified, risk percentages are modified. Sequences are patented. Progress (money) is made.

You continue to be anxious about privacy. You think, “if a company is telling me that my DNA data is me, then why should that company have so much access to me?” We are told that in our dangerous world we must give up some privacy for increased safety. For increased health we must give up some of our expectations about genetic privacy.

“Crimes of a Genetic Nature”

DNA is good for telling stories about the future. DNA as machomolecule, in control of our genetic destiny. DNA as code, programmable, controllable, readable, re-writable. Like other data-driven futures, DNA-based stories are stories about probability, risk, and control: risk of developing certain medical conditions and the control that DNA has over our biological characteristics. Risk that genetic information will be used to discriminate against us, risk that our DNA will be used to control what we are and what we can be.

Superflux is good at telling stories about the future, stories that help us connect with the abstractions of probabilities and the weirdness of our unevenly distributed futures. With Dynamic Genetics vs. Mann, Superflux tells a story about DNA, risk, and control, not with percentages and promises but through the carefully crafted evidence of a fictional patent infringement trial.

The story is set in Britain in the near future, when the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has been privatized and transformed into National Health Insurance (NHI). The trial’s defendant, Arnold Mann, faced with unmanageable NHI premiums due to undetermined genetic risk factors, turns to black market gene therapy, replacing his risky genes with healthy sequences patented by the fictional biotech giant Dynamic Genetics. With these new genes, his insurance costs are decreased, but he is prosecuted for the DNA sequences that he now holds in his cells, sequences that he didn’t pay the right people for.

At first glance, DG v Mann seems to be a very familiar kind of future, especially for people who don’t live in the UK and don’t have an NHS. For many Americans, a story about an insurance company trying to use anything and everything to screw you over is not an unfamiliar fiction but an everyday fact of life. The idea that an insurance company could one day use your DNA sequences to justify increasing your premiums or deny you coverage is such a pervasive story in the American debates about gene sequencing that it was codified into law, outlawed by the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. If anything, DG vs. Mann might give its first shock of weirdness with the notion that it could be weird for such corporate shenanigans to exist in the first place. Imagine a future where Americans think that privatized insurance is a frightening and ridiculous scenario!

This is one way that design fiction could begin to help us “bypass the established narratives about the present and future,” challenge us to see the present world from a new perspective, and teach us to challenge our assumptions about what is and what might be possible–both technologically and politically. Design fictions show technologies at the edge of speculation and reality, inviting us to imagine, question, and debate the applications and implications of new science and technology in a cultural context. Exploring genetic technologies in relation to government programs, the business of health care, and the ongoing debates about piracy and intellectual property allows for discussion not just about the function of the technology itself, but its inextricable relationships with power, politics, economics, and society.

Fictions give life to these complex relationships and give us a vocabulary to debate the kind of future we want (think of how often Gattaca used to come up in conversations about DNA sequencing). But while such stories are good at challenging our assumptions about how a technology might be used, rarely do they challenge the deeper assumptions about technological power and control.

What does the world look like when we bypass the established narratives of DNA as the of master of our readable and rewritable future? What if DG vs. Mann is actually a story about genetic indeterminacy?

“Good Source of 6 Vitamins & Minerals”

The DNA evidence in DG vs. Mann is not human readable. Strips of paper with tiny, indecipherable A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s highlight the regions of Arnold Mann’s genome that are infringing on Dynamic Genetic’s patents. Looking at these strips, we don’t know what diseases he was at risk for, how much of a burden he would one day be on the insurance pool, or even if the pirated gene therapy has actually changed his odds of developing the disease.

It’s possible that Mann’s risky sequences are part of the relatively small set of gene variants that are known to directly cause devastating diseases. But if Mann is an otherwise healthy adult, it’s much more likely that the NHI actuaries are looking for common gene variants that have been statistically associated with very common and very expensive diseases: type II diabetes, cancers, and cardiovascular disease.

What does it mean if you have, for example, a diabetes-associated sequence in your genome? In terms of real world health outcomes, the small changes in risk associated with any one such variant probably don’t mean much, especially compared to the big effects that environment and diet can have.

Indeed, it’s harder to imagine what these numbers might mean for your health than what they could mean for your health insurance. These associations provide an “objective” justification to what the insurance company wanted to do all along: get more money. As long as people still believe that DNA is in control of our biological destiny, these associations don’t actually have to be biologically meaningful in order to have a big effect.

What does it mean then to use gene therapy to change these risky gene sequences? Considering that for most health outcomes, zip code is a better predictor than genetic code, probably not much. But if an insurance company can use DNA sequences to justify charging more, then altering gene sequences isn’t necessarily about being healthier but simply appearing healthier to the risk calculators. The new variants are the genetic equivalent of sugary breakfast pastries fortified with vitamins and minerals, an unknown risk with a quantifiable veneer of “healthiness.”

Unlike Pop-Tarts, however, when it comes to deciding who gets affordable insurance coverage, such genetic spoofing might ironically be enough to translate to better health in the real world, where access to health care is much more important than DNA. For Arnold Mann, the potential dangers—medical and legal—of undergoing back-alley gene therapy is worth the risk in order to get affordable insurance. People have done weirder things for health care.

INTRODUCTION BY ANAB JAIN

Whilst our practice is primarily project-led, whether thats client-focused, commissioned or self initiated work, we also like to continually find new ways of exploring the theoretical frameworks within which many aspects of our work are situated. With this in mind we have decided to invite people, whose ideas and research we find inspiring, to contribute to the Superflux blog, with the aim of creating an open space for discussion and reflection.

And so we are thrilled to have writer, researcher and futurist Paul Graham Raven kick-off this endeavour, by discussing the idea of Infrastructure Fiction in the context of his research work at the Pennine Water Group.

Photo Credit: Vivi Trujillo/Corporacion Fractal

My name’s Paul Graham Raven, and I’m a researcher in infrastructure futures at the University of Sheffield. Team Superflux have very kindly invited me to take the mic and talk about the potential of applying critical design practice and futures thinking to the infrastructural domain. What follows is very much a theory under development; feedback and critique is not just welcome, but actively encouraged.

To begin, though, allow me to quote one of my hosts:

“These projects bypass the established narratives about the present and future that create the hypnosis of normality, and in doing so allow for an emotional connection with the raw weirdness of our times, opening up an array of possibilities.” – Anab Jain, keynote talk from Next13

I’ve begun with this quote from Anab because it’s one of the neatest summaries I’ve found of what design fiction does. Defining how it does what it does, however, is a little more slippery, as it’s less about method than it is about results. We can say that design fiction tends toward the visual: images, videos, simulations, renderings, even theatrical performance. We can also say that in order to produce the desired effect – which we might sum up as a thought-provoking cognitive estrangement – a design fiction has to believe in itself, or at least give the impression of believing in itself. But rather like the presentation of a paper at a conference, the images and videos and so on are the medium, a delivery system for the memetic payload. The payload is possibility, the potential for a different world: a loud bang to break the spell of hypnosis.

Over the last year and half, a bunch of infrastructure academics and researchers, myself among them, managed to commit design fiction by accident.

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“All-in-One” was an EPSRC-funded project involving researchers and investigators from the University of Sheffield’s Pennine Water Group, Cranfield University, De Montfort University and the University of Leicester. The project’s remit was unusually open-ended, especially for an infrastructure gig: the basic research question was “would it be possible to replace all the disparate utility infrastructures which we have currently with a system that uses one single unified infrastructure to fulfil all the needs of end-users?” (Research questions are the polar opposite of poetry.)

With a background in science fiction and speculative thinking, this was right up my street. But it was new territory for the civil engineers, modellers and risk analysis types I was working alongside; they were used to working in predominantly quantitative modes, with established systems, analytical frameworks and processes, with strict specifications and roadmaps to completion. Infrastructure is prosaic, practical stuff – it’s mundane, in the literal sense of being of-the-world. It’s about keeping the lights on; if you start getting all visionary, people might think you’re some sort of Tesla wannabe.

Design occupies an interesting position astraddle C P Snow’s two-cultures divide, with one foot in the engineer’s world of practical considerations and the manipulation of materials, and the other foot in the more arty realms of the unfettered imagination. Designers think differently to engineers because design has internalised the notion of critical production, of praxis as discourse, of reflexive rhetoric. To a designer, what a thing means is as important – sometimes more important – as what it does and how it does it.

My theory is that is if you combine a speculative writer like me with engineers, then the gestalt entity that results sits somewhat nearer the centre of the two-cultures spectrum. Just about where you might expect to find a designer, in fact.

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The core output of the All-in-One project’s early stages were a handful of vignettes that described possible – if not necessarily plausible – solutions to the All-in-One question. These largely took the form of presentations in the established engineering project-proposal style: much talk of practicalities, materials, logistical problems and sociopolitical challenges.

But leave the format aside for a moment, and look at the actual ideas we came up with: a “city blood” circulatory system, wherein energy is carried to homes dissolved in water like oxygen is carried to our cells by haemoglobin; a rhizome-topology urban network of underground freight-delivery tunnels; the entire planet powered by orbital solar collector satellites, and eventually by a belt of photovoltaics on the moon; and a subterranean modular city based around the central need for water, energy and fresh air. These are combinations of prior speculations and actual contemporary tech developments (the “solar globe” vignette owes a debt to the Shimizu Corporation’s more ambitious blue-sky projects, for instance, and my own “Intertubes” vignette used the Foodtubes proposal as its jump-off point), and they were put together with an engineer’s eye for actual achievable systems, at least as far as technological plausibility is concerned. The links embedded above will let you download the “condensed flyers” we did toward the end of the project; you’ll note that these still speak the language of the proposal, of the project pitch. We were trying to convince our audience of the possibilities, because we were also trying to convince ourselves of them.

Remember what I said back at the beginning, about how design fiction has to believe in itself to do its work? I think if we’d had the knack of that, if we’d found ways to present them not as proposals but as faits accompli, we’d have had four chunks of infrastructure fiction on our hands.

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Why would anyone want to do design fiction about infrastructure, though? That’s not just a valid question but an important one, and it calls back to that quote of Anab’s that I opened with. But first, we need to decide what “infrastructure” actually is.

Outside the world of civil engineering, infrastructure is profoundly unsexy. Oh, sure, there are people who can work up an aesthetic appreciation of a really good bridge, or admire the robust geometry of the classic British electricity pylon, or even enthuse about the mud-caked technological sublime of a tunnel-boring machine… but infrastructure’s function is not a thrill in its own right. That wasn’t always the case, though. The first electric lighting systems, the bridges and tunnels and engines of the pioneering railways, the epic sewers concealed by Bazalgette’s Embankment on the Thames: they were wonders of their age, and changed the way life was lived wherever they appeared².

But we grew accustomed to them, and now – at least here in the West – take them for granted. Indeed, we might nowadays define infrastructure as being that part of the built environment which is only ever noticed when it stops working. At all other times, it’s lurking in the background, humming away in the interstices, invisibly providing you with, as the stacktivist Jay Springett puts it, “the means to not die” – plus, depending on the nation-state in which you find yourself, providing the means to achieve a variety of tasks and/or move around the landscape.

Even when you spend most of your working day thinking about infrastructure, it’s surprisingly hard to make the leap from the abstract to the actual – as illustrated by the number of times I’ve caught myself stood with my brow creased and my mouth full of toothpaste, thinking about ways to encourage more careful domestic water usage habits, while the tap pours a couple of litres per minute of meticulously and expensively treated water straight down the plughole.

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No one would describe Douglas Adams as a “hard” science fiction writer, but I’ve long felt that he was better than many of his more serious contemporaries at communicating the paradoxical relationships we humans have with the world we inhabit. Near the start of the third Hitchhiker’s Guide novel, Life, the Universe and Everything (Adams, 2009), Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect observe the arrival of an unusual spacecraft (which, if I remember correctly, looks rather like a low-budget Italian bistro turned on its side) in the middle of Lords cricket ground during an important test match. This spacecraft remains unnoticed by the players, the crowd, or even the stolid BBC reporters covering the match; this is because it includes a device which generates a “Someone Else’s Problem” field, whose inventor realised that, while making something invisible is very tricky, making something look like someone else’s problem is much, much easier, as most people are predisposed to that position.

The challenge for infrastructure fiction is to dispel the Someone Else’s Problem field and reveal the elided centrality of infrastructure to pretty much everything we do. Its challenge is to explore what infrastructure means.

To do that, we’re going to have to kill off some assumptions.

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From a designer’s point of view, infrastructure is a given. It’s the invisible and unacknowledged stuff – supply chains, communications networks, utility grids – that make the designed object producible, deliverable, and able to function as intended. Without infrastructure, there would be no designers. It’s the oxygen of the profession.

From an infrastructural engineer’s point of view, infrastructure is an intricate and interdependent web of entangled systems which ends at the point where it goes through the wall of your home, factory or office, thus granting the occupants the ability to do a variety of things, starting with not dying.

Appropriately enough – or so you’d think – these are both structuralist conceptions: understandings of a system in terms of what it does and how it does it. Capacities, voltages, efficiencies, safety features, diurnal demand profiles, materials, specs… engineering bread’n’butter, in other words.

Both of these conceptions are both right and wrong.

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The first assumption that needs to die: that infrastructure enables designed objects. As the old saying goes, the problem is that it’s not even wrong; it’s just one-sided. The relationship between infrastructure and designed objects is duplex, a synthesis. The multiplication of designed objects, of tools and machines and appliances, both necessitated and enabled the construction of infrastructure, which in turn enabled a further proliferation and multiplication of appliances. Look at the history of electricity grids, for instance; the basic physics had been understood for quite some time before anyone came up with useful and affordable (and safe) ways to use this new phenomenon, but selling those appliances was dependent on there being an infrastructure to connect them to. Neither sprang fully-formed from the Zeus-brow of human invention. They co-evolved; they’re still co-evolving. (Though one could make a good argument that the designed objects are presently out-evolving the infrastructure, at least in some locations.)

The second assumption that needs to die: that infrastructure ends at the wall of your house. This is a little like assuming that the chunky plastic pistol-shaped thing with a cable coming out of the handle is what drills holes in your walls. It is the drill-bit that drills the holes; the motor unit of the power drill simply enables you to use the drill-bit to make bigger, deeper holes more quickly, and in a greater variety of materials than you could make using elbow grease alone. The power drill is not the tool; it is a function-specific extension of the infrastructure, an interface between the tool and the abstract world of harnessed energy.

When you connect a device to an infrastructure, the latter is effectively subsumed by the former. It’s a sort of metonymy: the power and potential that we imply when we speak of a power drill is actually the power and potential of the electricity grid, an electrical loa riding the horse of the drill.

You don’t believe me? Unplug the power drill from the wall, take it somewhere there are no wall sockets. Or take a nicely chromed faucet to some place without a water distribution mains, or a smartphone to somewhere where there’s no signal.

Ain’t much use to you now, is it?

This is what you see when the spell of Anab’s “hypnosis of normality” is broken around infrastructure. Design fiction is getting pretty skilled at problematising the power drill (faucet, smartphone, whatever) from the perspective of the user; what infrastructure fiction needs to do is get skilled at problematising the tap as seen from the other side of the wall.

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(As-yet-untested thesis: a functional and/or designed object which in no way requires or depends upon an infrastructure can itself be considered a sort of infrastructure.

The more you think about it, the more you realise how tiny a category of things that actually is.)

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There was no predefined methodology for the All-in-One vignettes. When we started in on them, all we had was a broad blue-sky research question and a wiki stuffed with ninety or so new or improved technologies; each subgroup of the project team set out to answer the former using items taken from the latter.

As such, they’re not a matched or complementary set of futures like you’d get from the classic 2×2 matrix. Each vignette reflects the assumptions (and the obsessions) of its creators. In the long run, infrastructure fiction practice may want to avoid this sort of haphazardness, but it might be beneficial at this early stage. After all, critical design is a critique of design, an inherently reflexive undertaking. So critical infrastructure design should surely do something similar: expose flawed heuristics and frangible assumptions, especially those of its own practitioners.

There’s an subtle difference between those who started with an idea and generated a world around it which would make it possible (as in the “Solar Globe” and “Intertubes” vignettes), and those who started with a set of problematic assumptions about the world and created an idea to solve them (as in the “Subterrania” vignette). This is a tension I see a lot of in the nascent discipline of science fiction prototyping; the term has been popularised by Brian David Johnson of Intel in his book of the same title (Johnson, 2010), which makes a case for the writing of science fiction narratives as a method for extrapolating the consequences and implications of new ideas, technologies or phenomena.

Bruce Sterling talks about design fiction as being diegetic prototypes, as “stories that tell worlds”: the object or product or service in the foreground implies the social, political, economic and technological dimensions oif the storyworld in which it must be assumed to exist, and it is this implication of diegesis that does the “work” of design fiction. One of the difficulties I have with Johnson’s approach (which I’ve been wrestling with in a paper currently under review at Technological Forecasting & Social Change) is that it explicitly subordinates the diegesis to the novum. Much like the classic Gernsbackian science fiction story, the idea is the star, and everything else follows from that; the world is assembled so as to accommodate and extrapolate the idea. Or, to put it another way, diegetic prototyping “creat[es] ‘pre-product placements’ for technologies that do not yet exist” (Kirby, 2009). Such practice can be (meta)critical, as in much of what we think of as design fiction, but Johnson’s approach is more advocative; design fiction uses the foreground to make you think about the background, while Johnson’s mode of prototyping uses the background to make you think about the foreground.

To me, this looks like a case of cart before horse – in fact, I’d argue it accurately reflects the problematic mindset of contemporary tech-biz approaches to innovation, but that’s a rant for another day. As suggested above, new technologies and infrastructures alike came into existence as a result of the continuing socioeconomic interactions of people and other already-existing technologies and infrastructures; as such, you need to do a bit of thinking about the world before you can do any sensible thinking about a new thing that you’re proposing to introduce to said world.

That’s not to say Johnson’s wrong, though. In fact, I think the All-in-One vignettes show that you get different sorts of prototype from each approach – but I need to do a whole lot more experimentation and tinkering with techniques before I feel I can quantify those differences, and what value they have. My theory is that a reversed approach might be more useful at the infrastructural scale: that one can start by imagining a coherently problematic world or worlds, much as you might with a 2×2 matrix, and allow it/them to suggest objects or products or services that might come into being as a response to such; “worlds that tell stories”, in other words³.

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What keeps our vignettes from being true design fictions is their format: they are proposals, not yet convinced of themselves. We were still thinking in engineering terms when I finally realised how close we were to doing design fiction: thinking about feasibility, roadmaps and path-dependecy, about practical barriers to actualisation and so forth, as opposed to making the design-fictioneer’s leap and imagining the problem already solved, so as to ask what that solution might tell us about the problem that we hadn’t already noticed.

Convincing engineers that feasibility can be handwaved away in order to focus on meaning and implication is surprisingly difficult, as it goes against every instinct of their practice. I got there in the end with my colleagues, but the approach needs to better systematised and tested before it’ll float easily with an unprepared audience; that systematisation is what I hope to spend the next few years working on.

But imagine for a moment that our “proposals” concretised properly; imagine for a moment we’d had the skills and resources to make true design fictions of them. Imagine them being convinced of themselves, delivered as slick three-minute IPO promo videos, as guided tours of installations or facilites, or as reports from industrial spies or saboteurs. Imagine them narrated by a non-engineer: by an eco-activist, a ruralist refusenik, a hypernationalist political firebrand, a ubicomp urbanite, a lobbyist for Big Carbon, by Joe Sixpack or a Daily Mail NIMBY. Imagine them as faits accompli, presented in a manner that elides their fictionality.

See? Design fiction, of a sort.

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While it’s satisfying to retrospectively identify the All-in-One vignettes as a form of design fiction, or even to coin the term “infrastructure fiction” for them, the question remains: what use are they?

For the Superfluxian audience, such a question is probably (hopefully?) anathema: design’s internalisation of critique makes the point moot. They’re thought experiments, exercises in reflexive critique of both practice and principle. The ends justify the means, right? So all I need do is remind you to stop thinking that infrastructure is Someone Else’s Problem. Unless you’re spinning wool from your own sheep or whittling wooden spoons, everything you do touches (or is touched by) infrastructure. This means there’s a whole new layer of questions you could be asking in your practice – and as climate change, resource distribution inequity and fragile global supply chains become increasingly dominant forces in the chaotic megasystem of the world, they’re questions you need to be asking.

To my colleagues in engineering, and to businesses and agencies thinking about innovation and infrastructure and the troubled times ahead, I would say this: you have been trained, and trained well, to imagine the possible as constrained by the plausible, for what you imagine must be buildable. That’s as it should be… but you must learn to switch it off from time to time.

This isn’t so much about thinking outside the box, that most tired of innovation cliches; if anything, it’s about thinking about the box, asking how and why the box constrains you. It might help to think of vignettes and infrastructure fictions as a type of theoretical model, albeit one that is almost entirely qualitative. The point is not to see whether they hold up to the tests of physics, or whether they can be evaluated against cost, resilience or feasibility; indeed, it is to be expected that most infrastructure fictions would fail at least one of these types of test. And therein lies the real point: failure is instructive, and the failures and flaws of imaginary systems at this sort of scale – not to mention the circumstances which might influence the likelihood or otherwsie of that failure – are impossible to explore in reality.

Design fiction is a sandbox, a test-bed, a gedankenexperiment; it’s the technological archaeology of imagined futures. If design fiction is a discourse both in and around start-up culture and bleeding-edge technologism, then infrastructure fiction can do the same thing for global sustainability, infrastructure policy and the iteration of appliance functionality. It can break the hypnosis, collapse the Someone Else’s Problem field. It can make infrastructure legible – and once you can read a story, you can write it a new way.

Of course, you can still do infrastructural engineering without thinking about the context in which you’re doing it; we’ve been doing that for the last hundred years or more, after all.

But look where that got us.

Endnotes: 

¹ – Tesla’s place in the geek canon is not echoed in the trad engineering canon; indeed, I suspect that’s a big part of why he’s in the geek canon at all.

² – This sensawunda lives on in attenuated form in the collective culture of civil engineering; my favourite conference drinking game⁵ involves taking a drink every time a presenter or panellist speaks in reverent tones about the ambition and longsightedness of the Victorians. Regrettably, the culture has largely forgotten that those genuinely astonishing projects were made possible by a nigh-total lack of regulation, and a class system that permitted the systematic exploitation of the navvies.

³ – I’m thinking of calling it “mimetic prototyping”, because Plato isn’t around to call me out in an angry blog-post for misusing the other half of his dialectic.

⁴ – We did try making some videos, but the main thing they communicated was that the making of videos is best left to people who know a lot about making videos, or at least those who have the time and resources to make a proper go of it.

⁵ – To be totally clear, there is no actual drinking involved. Well, not during the conferences, anyway.

Works cited: 

Adams, D. Life, the Universe and Everything. Pan, London, 2009

Johnson, B. D. Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction Morgan & Claypool, San Francisco, CA, 2011

Kirby, D. “The Future Is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development.” Social Studies of Science 40.1 (2009): 41–70.