Strategic Design Fiction

This article aims to discuss the role of the dominant critical tradition of design fiction, as well as defending the merits of a pragmatic and strategic view on design fiction, as potentially real solutions. By adapting one of the most prominently referenced models for speculative design (Auger 2013), and using Ryan’s (1980) concepts of factual, non-factual, and fictional statements, we propose a way of clarifying how the ‘realness’ of a given design fiction places it as a speculative design or an actual pragmatic vision for the future. Our contribution is a differentiation of pragmatic strategic, and speculative critical design fiction, based on their plausibility as well as their realness. This creates a clear agenda for distinguishing between different design research agendas of design fiction, potentially applying it in widely different practices.