Co-producing design fictions as part of everyday utopian practice

Paper presented at: Utopias, Futures and Temporalities: Critical Considerations for Social Change, Bristol, 19th – 20th 2015.

Dr James Duggan ESRI, MMU

j.duggan@mmu.ac.uk @dugganjr

Joseph Lindley University of Lancaster

joseph.lindley@gmail.com@joegalen

Design Fiction

• Design fictions - science fiction, science fact and design to create diegetic prototypes

• Prototypes exist within ‘story worlds’ (Bleecker 2009)

• ‘Suspend disbelief about change’ (Sterling 2012) • Design (use and utility) and fiction (utopian,

narrative, plot and story etc) • Future mundane (Foster 2013)

Design Fiction and Everyday Utopias

• Everyday utopias (Cooper 2014) • Similarities - design fiction and everyday utopianism • Opportunities - intentionality and the collective

authorship of preferable futures (Garforth 2009), driven by the aspiration, anticipation and imagination of individuals and communities (Appadurai 2013)

• Co-produced design fictions as everyday utopian articulation and enactment?

Ranciere

“The police, to begin with, is defined as an organisational system of coordinates that establishes a distribution of the sensible or a law that divides the community into groups, social positions and functions. This law implicitly separates those who take part from those who are excluded, and it includes a prior aesthetic division between the visible and invisible, the audible and inaudible, the sayable and unsayable.”

Sans papiers to sans duty

The Sans Duty Project

• Brixton Pound (B£) – a local currency and everyday utopian community

• Aim: do for tax what the B£ does for money• Create a community-based, practical alternative• Co-produce design fictions– Workshop – Develop artefact – Film community members (in 2018) – Present speculative documentary as stimulus for

discussion about tax at workshop

Terry Veblen’s Just Tax Zone

Questions and future directions…

Any questions?