“I think of design as a kind of creative authoring practice — a way of describing and materializing…”

“I think of design as a kind of creative authoring practice — a way of describing and materializing ideas that are still looking for the right place to live. A designed object can connect an idea to its expression as a made, crafted, instantiated object. These are like props and conversation pieces that help speculate, reflect and imagine, even without words. They are things around which discussions happen, even with only one other person, and that help us to imagine other kinds of worlds and experiences. These are material objects that have a form, certainly. But they become real before themselves, because they could never exist outside of an imagined use context, however mundane and vernacular that imagined context of social practices might be. Designed objects tell stories, even by themselves.

If design can be a way of creating material objects that help tell a story, what kind of stories would it tell and in what style or genre? Might it be a kind of half-way between fact and fiction? Telling stories that appear real and legible, yet that are also speculating and extrapolating, or offering some sort of reflection on how things are, and how they might become something else?”

Imaginary Gadgets 0004: Design Fiction | Beyond The Beyond

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