Aesthetics of futures. Shaping shared visions of tomorrow

Abstract Designers – as futurists – by participating in the building of the future, create new levels of value with the motivation to fulfil the unmet needs and desires of people. Overstepping the private mission, design, such as other creative fields (cinema, literature, art, photography, etc.), creates utopian or dystopian narrations, exploring the dimension of public exhibition, involvement and empowerment. Starting from these premises after a short introduction on the relationship between design and humanities the paper pays special attention to the fictionary role of design. The paper will present the importance of design in the debate about “Future Literacy” introducing the notion of design fiction though a reading of the evolution of the respective theoretical framework. Finally, the authors will analyse the case-study of the designer and artist Karolina Sobecka introducing a reflection on the aesthetics of design fictions and on the value of design in the practice of sharing futures.


Design and future: a humanistic perspective
During the historical conference on design research held in Helsinki in September 1996 "No guru, no method", Victor Margolin proposed the term design studies to underline the distinctive factor of basic inquiry in design: "Design studies is an interpretative practice, rooted firmly in the techniques of the humanities and the social sciences, rather than in the natural sciences." (Margolin 1996in Roth 1999. Historically, at the end of the 19th century, when the breach between art and science had become unsustainable, philosopher Vilem Flusser realized that "The word design came to fill the gap and bridge together both branches [...] It (design) could do this since it has an expression of the internal connection between art and technology. Hence, in contemporary life, design more or less, indicates the site where art and technology (along with their respective evaluative and scientific ways of thinking) come together as equals, making a new form of culture possible" (Flusser 2003, 3).
Flusser's consideration and the trans-disciplinary approach push toward a conception of design as "third culture" (Snow 1961;Brockman 1995;Lingiardi and Vassallo 2011;Citton 2012): design -in its meaning as a project design activity -is thus understood as an ideal place of meeting of different and diversified knowledge.
Design studies consider objects and processes from a critical theory perspective and through humanistic inquiry: "The distinction between project-oriented design research and the scholarly area of design studies reflects the extension of design from a form-giving activity to an interdisciplinary process dealing with complex systems and solutions." (Roth 1999, 19) The dichotomy evoked by the terms "art" and "technology"/"technique" and "culture", which historically places design at a crossroad of disciplines, also assigns to design a role connected with its mediation capacity or even as a direction activity (Maldonado 1976;1979). Depending on the focus of the project, design can act as technical discipline designing tangible elements -form, function and materiality of the product -or it can act on a cultural level designing intangible elements like meaning and value. The coming of the so-called post-fordist paradigm and the consolidation of a productive system evermore based in immateriality and intangible "goods" linked to the use of information and oriented through relational and emotional aspects5, reinforce the importance of design as a cultural agent. The role of knowledge is crucial: beyond value creation through material production, new value is created through the production and processing of knowledge itself.
Design is the field that, perhaps, can better embody the present attempt to overcome the dichotomy between hard and soft sciences (Maldonado 2010, 9). As a research field, it is understood as an inquiry on the motivations and objectives of the production of artefacts and systems and as a questioning on how it can be possible to foresee such artefacts and systems to be of service to man. Then, in this way, design research can give birth to the overcoming of the separation of the two cultures (Zingale 2012). In particular, humanities and social sciences constitute a pool of knowledge that, when meeting design, in fact follow it to pursue its ultimate goal: to act on behalf of man's wellbeing, whether it is a wellbeing that comes from the sensory satisfaction of aesthetic enjoyment, or it is a physical, perceptual, social and relational wellbeing.
The experience of the Humanities Design Lab (hereafter HD Lab), funded in November 2011 by an internal funding program for basic research (Farb) in the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano -aware of the relevance that humanities research fulfills within the international scientific community -was aimed to extend and exemplify the innovative contributions of humanities to design and to make visible the knowledge networks that surround design. HD Lab's research, grounded in the Polytechnic School, represents the context in which to experiment a fully "human and humanistic design culture". This means a form of research where design is intended as "third culture" and where it is possible to join the inventive spirit of art with the rigorous spirit of the scientific method.
In a sort of blur effect between knowledge fields (Rogers and Smyth 2010), design and humanities establish a two-way pathway: "On one side the humanistic disciplines bring cognitive models and operational analysis instruments and methods useful for design [...]; on the other design itself can contribute to redesign humanistic disciplines and 'fertilize' them, in an exchange that can be either linked to the praxis (connected to the hybridization of research tools) or to the epistemology (connected to the redefinition of their respective disciplinary statuses)." (Lupo 2011) The experience of the Humanities Design Lab (hereafter HD Lab), funded in November 2011 by an internal funding program for basic research (Farb) in the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano -aware of the relevance that humanities research fulfils within the international scientific community -was aimed to extend and exemplify the innovative contributions of humanities to design and to make visible the knowledge networks that surround design. HD Lab's research, grounded in the Polytechnic School, represents the context in which to experiment a fully "human and humanistic design culture". This means a form of research where design is intended as "third culture" and where it is possible to join the inventive spirit of art with the rigorous spirit of the scientific method.
Starting form the frame of the HDLab and form a cultural vision of the design discipline we propose a research into Design fiction, that represents a pursuit of new knowledge about the practice, as opposed to actually doing the practice, a research that explores different approaches, articulates why speculative design and design fiction are relevant to design today (Lindley 2014). User Cantered Design, Participatory Design, Social Design, Experimental Design, Advanced Design and Speculative Design represent different practices exemplifying the many variations of the role of design in visualization and engagement in theperception, benefit and assessment of futures in society. The technic of making, prototyping, scenario-planning, design fiction, are common artefacts used, in the design process, to materialize, or -better -give form to possible visions of the world to come. But how can designers influence a collective perception, and building, of futures? Overstepping the private mission, design, such as other creative fields (cinema, literature, art, photography, etc.), creates utopian or dystopian narrations, exploring the dimension of public exhibition, involvement and empowerment. Design Fictions -and the cooperative forms of design fictions in particularrepresents new forms of future literacy acting as social catalysers.

The Fictional Value of Design
"How can we move from abstractly looking into the future to actually building the future?" Eleonora Barbieri Masini, eminent futurist and one of the founders of the Club of Rome, through this question, was one of the first to address the need to re-conceptualize the futures. Masini (1982) distinguishes between three main ways to look at the future. A first one, that she defines a "prognosis" approach, relies on extrapolation, makes heavy use of social and economic indicators and helps identify what is probable between what is possible. A second one is a "vision" approach, where the future is connected to utopias and built on the basis of something we wish to happen, oriented to desirable societies. In this second approach the key element is the transformation of the present by a vision of the future: there is a stress on the need to examine the forces that draw us on. The third model (a combination of the previous ones) it is the level on which people think about the future in terms of projects. This means they seek to undertake projects that will change reality according to specific indications directed by utopias, by social ideals, by models and by visions, while, at the same time, taking into account empirical data on trends in the past and conditions in the present.

Figure 1 Masini's vision of possible future
This third way is based on both knowledge of "possibles" and "probables" and on a vision of "desirables" (on models and on ideals). Here we see emerging the choice -the interest of the observer. It is based on the belief that "something can be changed". Many Future studies' authors discussed about the different kind of potential futures we deal with. The cone model expresses the idea that "at any given moment in time, multiple paths are available and that, by an unknown combination of chance and design, we make our way 'forward' through a particular path, which is only one of many possible tracks" (Candy, 2010). The cone scheme of Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold (1994) has several interpretations but the one expressed by Joseph Voros (2003) underlines how preferable futures -concerned with what we "want to" happen -are connected with a more emotional and subjective perspective and enable a "visioning" and constructive view.
This way of interpreting future as a project is very closed to every-day wicked design problems: the continuous precarious tension between opportunity and constraints is the natural environment in which designers produce concept ideas and transform them into innovation. Moreover this third approach recalls to us the idea of design as "Third Culture". The design mixed nature and its well known trans-disciplinary approach, push toward a conception of design as an ideal place of meeting of different and diversified knowledge .
To build compelling visions of futures, design needs to immerge the end users in the vision. As Masini (1982) epitomizes the ability to nurture the seeds of change and develop visions is even more important than the capacity of making future analysis. Advanced design in particular, being oriented to create future products, works on the capacity to recognize the seeds of change that lie in the past and the present and to create visions combining artistic inspirations and technological breakthroughs (Celi & Rudkin, 2013). Visions narrated through scenarios, trends and images are effective, but one of the most fascinating practices is represented by Design fiction for its capacity to engage people who carry and nurture the seeds of change, and to shape possible futures.

The Three Design Fiction Paths
Within the last decade, there has been an increased attention in the concept of Design fiction as a new approach or practice within design research. As Julian Bleecker observed in an essay published in 2009, the link between design and fiction was originated as an integration of three different paths (technology, art, science fiction), in order to find opportunities, for design, "to re-imagine how the world may be in the future".
According to Bruce Sterling (2013), who was the first to use the term in 2005, "Design fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbeliefs about change. [...] 'Deliberate' use means that design fiction is something that people do with a purpose. 'Diegetic' is from film and theatre studies. [...] Design fiction doesn't tell stories; instead, it designs prototypes that imply a changed world. 'Suspending disbelief' means that design fiction has an ethics." References to the "diegetic" dimension of Design fiction were quoted also by Bleecker (2009) and by the film scholar David Kirby, who coined the term "diegetic prototypes" in his article "Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-World Technological Development" (2009). While Bleecker proposed a definition of Design fiction as the "cousin of science fiction" (2009, p.8), a link between science fact and science fiction, materialized through the initiative of the Near Future Laboratory, Kirby "refers to the way that a science fiction film provides an opportunity for a technical consultant to speculate within the fictional reality of the film, considering their work as more than a props maker or effects artist creating appearances" (Bleecker, 2009, p.39). This concept was partially applied in the work of the futurist Brian David Johnson who wrote the book Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction in 2011. However, increasingly Design fictions are moving beyond the medium of film, video and photography towards the materialization of, for example, physical props, models and prototypes.
At the same time, it is recognized that the technological world represented an important context for experimentations in this field, mostly due to the engagement of ICT based corporations and industries (such as Nokia with the project "Mixed Reality", 2009; Microsoft's Office Labs 2019Labs , 2009Apple Future Vision, 1987, etc.). Especially in the approach proposed by Kirby, the convergence between narrative and technology becomes evident. Featuring papers by scholars such as James Auger or Andrew Morrison, Ragnhild Tronstad and Einar Sneve Martinussen, in 2013 Derek Hales edited a special issue of "Digital Creativity" in which he presented a "provisional taxonomy" of Design fiction. Together with the focus on interface culture, he stressed the role of Design fiction in exploiting "the power of media design to craft and deploy compelling visions of the future" (Hales, 2013, p.2), where the most interesting concept, according to our vision, is the word "compelling". This objective is also shared by the social science community: "For social scientists the usefulness of SF prototyping is not only to fantasize about (or fetishize) speculative technologies, a role fulfilled eagerly by the media, but also to encourage vatic insights into the possible unintended consequences and social practices emerging from people's varied engagements with 'technology' and involvement in innovation. This helps to bring people's social practices into various forms of thinking and planning about the future, from policy making to marketing." (Birtchnell and Urry, 2013, p.25).
The purpose of Design fiction to "create a discursive space within which new forms of cultural artefact (futures) might emerge" (Hales, 2013, p.2), thus to designing with stories, involved also the word of design closer to art, through, for example, the experiences of Critical design (Raby, 2001;Bardzell et al., 2012;Dunne and Raby, 2013). Presenting the difference between American and British approach to Design fiction, Sterling wrote (2014): "Even though 'design fiction' is a form of design and not fiction -and even though its best-known practitioners today are all barnstorming, globalized nomads -it is likely to take on a stronger local colour. 'British critical design' and 'American design fiction' will remain as distinct as the RCA in London and USC and ACCD in Los Angeles; and we will see other regional variants emerging. European critical-design scenes will appear, plus some distinct US West Coast/East Coast approaches". From these theoretical premises, we isolate some actions that demonstrate how Design fiction may represent a practice through which design, as a tool for public engagement, intervene in the processes of social sharing of the future. The role of the designer, and in particular of the Advanced designer, in this sense is becoming crucial: the materialization of tomorrow products-service-system thorough scenarios, prototypes (Celi & Zindato, 2014) but also by interactive systems allows to present ideas of possible futures to a community of people without specific design skills. Thus, the value of designer's contribution is rapidly evolving from giving form to future scenarios to educate people, citizens, consumers, users to the practices of imagining futures and to the relative processes and dynamics (Celaschi & Formia, 2014).

Social sharing of futures through Design Fiction
As already illustrated in Advance Design practice for sharing futures (Celi & Formia, 2015) we believe that there is a shifting paradigm from "building" to "sharing" possible visions of the future through design and, in particular, through Design fiction. We have identified projects and initiatives in which the designer's ability to create new visions of the future is made available to students, citizens, private or public organizations. With this aim, we have built a visual representation (Fig. 3) in which the drivers of Design fiction projects (technology driven, art driven or science fiction driven) are connected to possible targets, through three kinds of action: cultivate, promote, co-generate.

Figure 3. Social sharing of futures through Design Fiction
These actions, documented with case studies that belong to contemporary contexts (Celi and Formia, 2015), represent also a progressive level of engagement of the public in collaboratively driven initiatives: thus the qualitative analysis is used to understand possible models that enable people and communities to talk about the future. With this aim, Advanced design practice, but more specifically Design Fiction, can be recognized as a "transformation catalyst" able to create new opportunities and to improve, not only companies, but, more in general, people's ability to cope with change (Borja De Mozota, 2006). This transformative action has recently been recognized and documented inside Design processes' inquiry, and in the framework of Front and of innovation in particular, trough some significant experiences such as Lego case (Deserti & Rizzo, 2014) and Fiat Mio dream-car in Brasil (Celaschi et al., 2015) that, gathering people's conception of futures, activate new value creation in a grassroots process. These cases were oriented to co-generation of future product but, being driven also from market expectations and so strictly connected to product, they could difficultly embed a far future, moreover their aesthetic quality is bound by actual production constraints.

Design Fiction and speculative futures
A great difference that can be find between Advance Design practice and Design Fiction is given by the speculative dimension that only a more free action can pursuit, not bound by the constraints of the industrial world and more addressed to a social dimension. Design historians (such as Grace Lees-Maffei & Kjietil Fallan, 2013), design curators (such as Paola Antonelli), but mostly militant designers (such as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby) have frequently made reference to the Italian Radicals, claiming the heritage of this movement as expression of social usefulness. The Italian Radical groups (Archizoom, 9999; Superstudio, U.F.O.) together with single figures such as Alessandro Mendini, Ugo La Pietra, Riccardo Dalisi, constituted an avant-guardist position. They formulated utopian and dystopian images, projects and ideas of futures as ideological forms of critique and provocation, materialized in products (mostly presented in exhibition, such as "Superarchitettura", Pistoia, 1966, "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape", New York, 1972, section "Environments"), in didactic experiments (Global Tools, 1973-1975 and in magazines (among which "Pianeta Fresco", "IN", "Rassegna", "Porgettare in più", "Casabella"). However even if, this short-lived experience was openly criticised by contemporary authors for its ideological background and the absence of politic impacts and models of decision-making (Tafuri, 1973), it is now living a new fortune. The speculative dimension of those project is actually alive through Design Fiction, a practice that research the future remaining open to occurrences, to the unknown and to the unpredictable as they emerge in processes of change and negotiation (Morrison 2010;Morrison et al. 2010).
Speculative futures produced by design address the social value of this methodology: claiming, educating, activating collective awareness and involving non-designer competences represent a possible way through which the design project becomes a critical media for observing the present and formulating concrete instruments for exploring and sharing the possible and preferable.
Design fiction acts as a transformation process (Design Council, 2006) respecting the six main feature identified by the Design Council: working with community of practice 'upstream' of the traditional brief and sometimes even in a more undefined frame; mediating diverse points of view in a transdisciplinary dialogue; employing participatory design techniques that entangle users and frontline workers; understanding and shaping relationships but most of all leaving behind its action not only the artefact, the shape of a solution, but a different critical attitude in everyday life.
The transformative value of design fiction, its capacity of spreading new visions and possible futures acts through the specificity of each designer or artist and the flavour of his/hers poetics. The power of engagement is often proportionate to the strength of the aesthetics, to its capacity to convey the message and to arise people awareness of a certain topic. This bias, unfortunately, often results in Design Fictions that point to produce a strong first impact through indignation, fear or extremism finally producing critical -but still dystopian-visions generated by extreme consequences of current problems (think at design for disaster). Beside this kind of attitude and pursuing the idea of a phenomenological analysis of the aesthetical potential of speculative futures, we'll explore a more delicate and the art driven Design Fiction's case trough the inspiring work of Karolina Sobecka.

Karolina Sobecka: aesthetics of ephemeral
Karolina Sobecka works with animation, design, interactivity, computer games and other media and formats; she can be defined as an interdisciplinary artist and designer. Her recent projects focus on climate engineering as a way of investigating the values that drive technological innovation, and shape the philosophy that inscribes humans in nature. Her work seems to cast a critical eye on society but with a sensible style that engaged viewers in a knowing and self conscious series of performance exploring different kind of involvement and interaction developing a personal, light poetics of the ephemeral. As Mads Nygaard Falkman (2010) underlines, valuing aesthetics in design is mainly a matter of grasping its sensuous qualities, its distinctive appeals to the senses -which does not mean to apply a reductionist view of design discarding other qualities as function or ecologybut to emphasize the function of design objects as sensually appealing artefacts able to talk to us. Form, appearance but also the subtle interaction can be understood as a type of aesthetic communication that challenges experience and in doing so they can catalyse also an active role of the viewer/user challenging our understanding of things. The work of Karolina Sobecka is particularly interesting because explores different aesthetics of interaction without modelling an answer but giving shape to the question that she want to rise: her work traces the "what if".

Sniff
One of here most cited work -realized with Jim George in 2009 -is Sniff (Fig. 4), a work that combines emotion modelling with embodied interaction (Sobecka 2009). Sniff is a lively pup rendered on a large back-projection screen. Sniff acts as a behavioural portrait that interacts with people via machine-vision based sensing. The designer's choice was to avoid texture maps and synthetic fur and Sniff is presented as 3D animated polygonal model in a featureless black space. Sniff is a rather subtle canine behaviour-portrait; it will identify with one of several visitors a primary interactor, and has a sophisticated behavioural memory (Simon 2011). The juxtaposition between the authenticity of Sniff's behaviour and the abstraction of its visual representation is meant to amplify the value of persuasion connected to behavioural modelling.  Sobecka and Jim George, 2009)

Cloud
Karolina Sobecka has recently concentrated her effort on climate engineering as a way of investigating the values that drive technological innovation, and shape the philosophy that inscribes humans in nature. Even though facing a concrete and real topic she decide to focalize the attention and to question public through the most ephemeral natural object: clouds. She explores the connections between clouds and information technology by combining scientific information with more imaginative and experiential approaches.
Clouds have long been agents of the ungraspable and ephemeral. Using clouds as an object of investigation, Sobecka situates her projects at the intersection of art and geo-engineering. Geoengineering 1 is commonly defined as the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change (Sobecka, 2014). The practice, which is often viewed as a last resort response to climate change, reshuffles our ideas about nature and our place in it, about technology, values and knowledge. Sobecka's playful experiments ask serious questions about our faith in human technological ability: Can technology eventually solve our climate problems? Or are we foolhardy to think we know enough about natural systems to attempt to manipulate them?
She doesn't have one answer but invite visitors/people to find them spanning from cloud seeding to cloud tasting, to DNA donation.

Clouds, from Both Sides
In this project the clouds are photographed simultaneously from the ground looking up, and from a satellite looking down. While a satellite passes over our geo-location, we take a photograph looking towards the satellite. We record an observation of the clouds from the perspective of a human experience. Later we download the satellite's image and the cloud analysis. The two pairs of observations and images are displayed together. The project involved participants from different backgrounds, including writers, climate scientists, artists, weathermen and many others.

Cloud Tasting
Clouds contain traces of the environments and the human activity they have passed over. Sobecka has organized several Cloud Tasting events recreating clouds, following the human activity whose exhalations they contain. Each cloud sample is history stored in the material of the atmosphere: it can locate us on both the long geological timescale (by the concentration of CO2 and other gasses) and in seasonal cycle; or on short timescale locating the sources of emissions in the path of the air. In this way it is possible to find the places and people whose work and play released the odorous that travelled to us in the air.
By ingesting the samples the participants make themselves unprotected -and not politically distanced -from the complex networks of relations that enabled the pollution. The air we inhale and the social meaning of its make-up are given a physical form that can be viscerally experiencedmaking the air part of our perceptible experience, and a real part of our political discussion Figure 6. Clouds tasting (Sobecka 2014)

Poetics of futures
Considering the original meaning of aisthetá, "that which can be sensed", and Mads Nygaard Falkmann (2010) evaluation of aesthetics in Design, we can consider the aesthetic of Karolina Sobecka as expression of both the aesthetic of sensual relation and an aesthetics of communicative self reflection.
Her work addresses those aspects of aesthetics related to sensuous appearance and the experience of senses involving user in the production or exploitation of her performances subject and object became intertwined. Participation in her design fictions' process gives people ownership of a vision and deep understanding of the issue.
On the other side we can argue that there is an aesthetics of communicative self reflection not only because Sobecka design fictions communicate an idea which is the depth of the sensual phenomena.
Again in Mads Nygaard Falkman (2010, 46) we can find a sentence that really fits to her work: " An additional point is that the idea, though always a part of the sensual, cannot reach the surface of direct manifestation; instead it operates as a "transparence behind the sensible"." An important role is played by the dynamics of interaction that contributes to the creation of meaning (Penny, 2011). For example it is clear that in Tasting Clouds interactions are not simply the idiom of the fiction but are themselves the 'content' of the work; the experimental devices used to gather the clouds material as well as the Puppy cogenerate the experience and the concepts they come to embody. How Sobecka's projects in their sensory being point to a level of idea content or meaning? The poetic language she has developed has some interesting features: • Uses artefacts and systems relating to a contemporary techno-scientific world; • Rises question connected to every-one in every day life with a preference of ecological/climate topics; • Narrates the experience trough simple and moving images.
With her head on the clouds Karolina Sobecka traces the contours of a paradox at the heart of scientific observation: perhaps we only really "see" -we are able to consider -only what we are paying close attention to, yet we are frequently subject to perceptual blindness (Davis & Turpin 2015). How can we address people attention and participation?
We believe we should consider design to be a discipline that lies halfway between four systems of knowledge (inputs) that are traditionally unlikely to interact with each other: humanities, technology/engineering, art/creativity and economics/management. The proximity of design to these older forms of structured, specialised knowledge, which are not in conflict but rather act as catalysts of content and synthesisers of effects, makes design an area of knowledge with huge potential to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
The art driven approach of Karoline Sobecka even if working on very ephemeral elements confirm us that the multidisciplinary and multicultural approach suggests directing and managing interactions between forms of knowledge and experiences, helping assess the results and bringing them into constant and conscious interaction with the particular context. The alliance between design, art and anticipation can mix different types of knowledge in respect to the ethical objective embedded in the future. The capability to orient behaviours through values acts as an accelerator of change only if the project preserves in humanistic nature, in being a plan carried out by people and for people.