This special issue of Digital Creativity invites submissions to revisit the field of Design Fiction following the 2013 special issue and this then burgeoning field of practice. The overall focus of this call is on the ongoing mutations of the practice as one of world-making, emphasizing relations between design and literary, media and science practices. These practices can be said to differentially explore possible worlds and to have converged in continuously expanding territories of the fictional, the fictive and the fictioning. This special issue seeks to provide fresh insight on various histories and antecedents of this convergence of designing and fictioning as well as developing new approaches in Design Fiction and future opportunities for the field. We therefore encourage submissions which seek to challenge the conventions and orthodoxies and methodologies as espoused by early proponents (Bleecker, Dunne & Raby, Sterling, Kirby) and to large degree now commodified, codified and instrumentalised. We seek not a further normalization of Design Fiction but instead a radical and experimental opening up of its world-making capacities.
Papers are invited for the special issue across three overlapping areas:
- Papers offering Design Fictions as practiced, for example, of speculative infrastructures, otherworldly and fragmentary and partial worlds, regenerative landscapes and new forms of spatiality: have the territories of these designing-fictioning approaches expanded from futures world-building to more open and interventionist strategies in an eternal present?
- Papers exploring the processes of making of Design Fictions as media artefacts – especially in relation to digital transformation of diegetic practices in film-making, and scenography, games and XR as ‘what-if’ experimental spaces. We will be interested to similarly explore post-digital drawings and modelmaking in parallel as-if world-building practices.
- Papers offering novel theoretical positions and philosophical reflection on the conjunction Design Fiction and the field of practice after speculative design and post-critical design.
Please see Submission Instructions below.
