More Fiction for Science!
Identifying the unknown and latent needs of customers will be the biggest challenge for professionals working in the age of digitization. To counteract this, it’s important to begin thinking in terms of scenarios. How will a new technology change our everyday life? How will it affect the way we live and work? Here, innovation managers and designers can learn a lot from the realm of science fiction.
How can it be that a modern technological innovation was already foreseen almost 50 years ago? Is this simply a one-time coincidence, or was there something more to it? Were genius science fiction authors able to precisely predict the future – or were their visions in the end blueprints for the engineers who simply translated literary fantasies into new technologies?
Here’s one example. When did the great Apple iPad first see the light of day? In April of 2010? That answer is simultaneously right and wrong. Already back in 1968, such tablets could be seen on a console in the cafeteria of the starship in the classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a scene from this film, two astronauts, Frank Poole and Dave Bowman, watch a TV show on their tablets during their lunch break with the supercomputer HAL 9000; the computer has just told a moderator that it is content with being an artificially intelligent and autonomous specimen. This scene was shown as part of a lawsuit by Samsung in 2011, highlighting that Apple hadn't invented the computing tablet; rather, the idea was an invention of director Stanley Kubrick. For designers today, this scene merely shows that the tablet came to the market nine years later than anticipated, as Kubrick had imagined the innovation existing in the year 2001.
A Vision of Digitalization
How can it be that a technological innovation of today was foreseen almost 50 years ago? Is this just a one-off incident? Or is there something systematic about it? Was it just a case of brilliant science fiction authors accurately predicting the future? Or did their visions actually serve as blueprints for the engineers who simply translated literary fantasies into new technologies?
The famous chicken-egg discussion is one that science fiction authors have truly appropriated for themselves. If you were to evaluate all literature, you would see that writers have won this debate – at least purely from a statistical perspective. Many of the technological innovations that facilitate and determine our everyday life today were described in books written 30 or 40 years ago.
One particularly impressive example is the author Philip K. Dick. Up until his early death in 1982, Dick wrote about 120 short stories and more than 40 novels. He is considered one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time. Dick’s stories are still relevant to the present-day reader. They make us question reality and the existence of humans and machines: What distinguishes a person from a machine?
“Many of the technological innovations that facilitate and determine our everyday life today were described in books written 30 or 40 years ago.”
While Dick’s stories and theories were overlooked during his own lifetime, more than 30 years after his death the author is regarded as one of the most perceptive visionaries of the digital age. Dick was claustrophobic, he hardly ever left his house in a middle-class Californian suburb. Dick never did any research – the Internet didn’t exist back then – so he invented everything himself. In Dick’s imagination, he travelled through countless worlds aided by extensive drug experiments.
Films like The Matrix and eXistenZ are based on Dick’s ideas. This writer almost single-handedly defined the technological visions of the future that are portrayed by Hollywood. The list of film adaptations of Dick’s novels and short stories is as long as it is impressive: Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle, Screamers, Paycheck and Minority Report.
It has already been more than 15 years since Steven Spielberg created the film Minority Report, based on the short story by Dick. This film, with Tom Cruise in the lead role, captivated audience members with its numerous innovative technologies that were novel to the audience at the time: ubiquitous large-format digital displays, iris and facial recognition, and much more. Today, many of these concepts have been brought to life as a means of personalizing advertisements, digital out-of-home marketing, and interactive digital signage. Outdoor digital advertisements that can communicate with mobile phones and ad messaging that can be adapted to specific situations are within reach. As is the ability for these advertisements to access social media profiles or employ holograms that can combine a lighting atmosphere and create a relevant scent while presenting the consumers standing in front of them with suitable offers.
Science Fiction. Wenn die Zukunft zum Heute wird Edited by Philipp Thesen and Christian von Reventlow, Bonn, 2017. Authors: Matthias Haas, Thomas Le Blanc, Stefan Kohn, Philipp Thesen, Christian von Reventlow, a.o.
Straight Out of Science Fiction
For a designer, the most impressive thing about Minority Report is the background story of its production development. At the start of the project, Steven Spielberg invited well-known futurologists and MIT scientists to a three-day seminar with the aim of envisioning what the world might look like in the year 2054. This approach differs very little from the methods of design thinking, which designers use when describing the future. From the results of the seminar and the opinions of experts, Spielberg created a list outlining how medicine, transport technology, urban architecture, design, etc. are expected to develop by 2054. Still, Spielberg did not implement all of the results in his film – the prediction that by 2054 we would have smart toilets that could analyze what we ate in order to tell us what to eat tomorrow is something he left out.
“This approach differs very little from the methods of design thinking, which designers use when describing the future.”
Interviewed after the film’s release, Spielberg said, “I wanted to give the film some roots – get more science than fiction from it.” And it is this impulse – to discover, in a planned process, how technologies can influence the daily life of people – that designers share with those in science fiction, despite their other differences. While those dappling in the realms of science fiction possibilities, designers worth with other experts to uncover scenarios for the application of new technologies. The science fiction author enjoys describing the negative impacts that modern technology and artificial intelligence can have. The designer, in contrast, attempts to center the needs and desires of people in the way that technology is shaped in order to humanize the technology.
Designers really should, in future, read more science fiction.
Essay by Philipp Thesen
More Fiction for Science!
Identifying the unknown and latent needs of customers will be the biggest challenge for professionals working in the age of digitization. To counteract this, it’s important to begin thinking in terms of scenarios. How will a new technology change our everyday life? How will it affect the way we live and work? Here, innovation managers and designers can learn a lot from the realm of science fiction.
How can it be that a modern technological innovation was already foreseen almost 50 years ago? Is this simply a one-time coincidence, or was there something more to it? Were genius science fiction authors able to precisely predict the future – or were their visions in the end blueprints for the engineers who simply translated literary fantasies into new technologies?
Here’s one example. When did the great Apple iPad first see the light of day? In April of 2010? That answer is simultaneously right and wrong. Already back in 1968, such tablets could be seen on a console in the cafeteria of the starship in the classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a scene from this film, two astronauts, Frank Poole and Dave Bowman, watch a TV show on their tablets during their lunch break with the supercomputer HAL 9000; the computer has just told a moderator that it is content with being an artificially intelligent and autonomous specimen. This scene was shown as part of a lawsuit by Samsung in 2011, highlighting that Apple hadn't invented the computing tablet; rather, the idea was an invention of director Stanley Kubrick. For designers today, this scene merely shows that the tablet came to the market nine years later than anticipated, as Kubrick had imagined the innovation existing in the year 2001.
A Vision of Digitalization
How can it be that a technological innovation of today was foreseen almost 50 years ago? Is this just a one-off incident? Or is there something systematic about it? Was it just a case of brilliant science fiction authors accurately predicting the future? Or did their visions actually serve as blueprints for the engineers who simply translated literary fantasies into new technologies?
The famous chicken-egg discussion is one that science fiction authors have truly appropriated for themselves. If you were to evaluate all literature, you would see that writers have won this debate – at least purely from a statistical perspective. Many of the technological innovations that facilitate and determine our everyday life today were described in books written 30 or 40 years ago.
One particularly impressive example is the author Philip K. Dick. Up until his early death in 1982, Dick wrote about 120 short stories and more than 40 novels. He is considered one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time. Dick’s stories are still relevant to the present-day reader. They make us question reality and the existence of humans and machines: What distinguishes a person from a machine?
“Many of the technological innovations that facilitate and determine our everyday life today were described in books written 30 or 40 years ago.”
While Dick’s stories and theories were overlooked during his own lifetime, more than 30 years after his death the author is regarded as one of the most perceptive visionaries of the digital age. Dick was claustrophobic, he hardly ever left his house in a middle-class Californian suburb. Dick never did any research – the Internet didn’t exist back then – so he invented everything himself. In Dick’s imagination, he travelled through countless worlds aided by extensive drug experiments.
Films like The Matrix and eXistenZ are based on Dick’s ideas. This writer almost single-handedly defined the technological visions of the future that are portrayed by Hollywood. The list of film adaptations of Dick’s novels and short stories is as long as it is impressive: Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle, Screamers, Paycheck and Minority Report.
It has already been more than 15 years since Steven Spielberg created the film Minority Report, based on the short story by Dick. This film, with Tom Cruise in the lead role, captivated audience members with its numerous innovative technologies that were novel to the audience at the time: ubiquitous large-format digital displays, iris and facial recognition, and much more. Today, many of these concepts have been brought to life as a means of personalizing advertisements, digital out-of-home marketing, and interactive digital signage. Outdoor digital advertisements that can communicate with mobile phones and ad messaging that can be adapted to specific situations are within reach. As is the ability for these advertisements to access social media profiles or employ holograms that can combine a lighting atmosphere and create a relevant scent while presenting the consumers standing in front of them with suitable offers.
Science Fiction. Wenn die Zukunft zum Heute wird Edited by Philipp Thesen and Christian von Reventlow, Bonn, 2017. Authors: Matthias Haas, Thomas Le Blanc, Stefan Kohn, Philipp Thesen, Christian von Reventlow, a.o.
Straight Out of Science Fiction
For a designer, the most impressive thing about Minority Report is the background story of its production development. At the start of the project, Steven Spielberg invited well-known futurologists and MIT scientists to a three-day seminar with the aim of envisioning what the world might look like in the year 2054. This approach differs very little from the methods of design thinking, which designers use when describing the future. From the results of the seminar and the opinions of experts, Spielberg created a list outlining how medicine, transport technology, urban architecture, design, etc. are expected to develop by 2054. Still, Spielberg did not implement all of the results in his film – the prediction that by 2054 we would have smart toilets that could analyze what we ate in order to tell us what to eat tomorrow is something he left out.
“This approach differs very little from the methods of design thinking, which designers use when describing the future.”
Interviewed after the film’s release, Spielberg said, “I wanted to give the film some roots – get more science than fiction from it.” And it is this impulse – to discover, in a planned process, how technologies can influence the daily life of people – that designers share with those in science fiction, despite their other differences. While those dappling in the realms of science fiction possibilities, designers worth with other experts to uncover scenarios for the application of new technologies. The science fiction author enjoys describing the negative impacts that modern technology and artificial intelligence can have. The designer, in contrast, attempts to center the needs and desires of people in the way that technology is shaped in order to humanize the technology.
Designers really should, in future, read more science fiction.
Essay by Philipp Thesen