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The IKEA Catalogue:
Design fiction in academic and industrial collaborations
Barry Brown, Julian Bleecker, Marco D’Adamo, Pedro Ferreira, Joakim Formo, Mareike
Glöss, Maria Holm, Kristina Höök, Eva-Carin Banka Johnson, Emil Kaburuan, Anna Karlsson,
Elsa Kosmack-Vaara, Jarmo Laaksolahti, Airi Lampinen, Lucian
Leahu, Vincent Lewandowski, Donald McMillan, Anders Mellbratt, Johanna Mercurio, Cristian
Norlin, Nicolas Nova, Stefania Pizza, Asreen Rostami, Mårten Sundquist, Konrad
Tollmar, Vasiliki Tsaknaki, Jinyi Wang, Charles Windlin, Mikael Ydholm
Mobile Life Centre
Kista, Stockholm
barry@mobilelifecentre.org
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper is an introduction to the “Future IKEA Catalogue”,
enclosed here as an example of a design fiction produced from a
long standing industrial-academic collaboration. We introduce the
catalogue here by discussing some of our experiences using
design fiction` with companies and public sector bodies, giving
some background to the catalogue and the collaboration which
produced it. We have found design fiction to be a useful tool to
support collaboration with industrial partners in research projects
– it provides a way of thinking and talking about present day
concepts, and present day constraints, without being overly
concerned with contemporary challenges, or the requirements of
academic validation. In particular, there are two main aspects of
this we will discuss here, aspects that are visible in the enclosed
catalogue itself. The first is the potential of design fiction as a
sort of ‘boundary object’ in industry and academic collaboration,
and second the role of critique. After this introduction to the paper
we enclose the output of our collaboration in the form of the
catalogue itself.
2. Boundary objects and critique
The research centre where we work brings together ten or so
companies (including IKEA), along with three host academic
institutions, working together on different technology and
interaction related research projects. Research collaborations with
industry are something that can face many challenges for both
industrial and academic partners. First, there is the question of
different expectations over timelines and the sorts of problems
research should address. While it is not always the case, broadly
academic partners have a much longer focus, whereas industrial
partners need focus on much shorter timespans. The lifetime of a
company in the fortune 500 is less than fifteen years – one
perhaps should think how universities would behave if they only
survived for on average fifteen years. In turn, success for
industrial partners in a project is often seen through impact on
their own company. Careers within companies are made (and not)
on internal company impact. For academics – while impact is
important, it is mainly through publications and teaching.
Research collaborations can hit problems when the ‘output’ is
narrowly defined in terms of an academic paper, or what will fit
with an academic paper, in contrast to what will have an ‘impact’
within an organisation.
It is here that we have found design fiction ‘surprisingly useful’
[6]. Design fiction offers the possibility for a different genera of
communication, a possibility for collaboration that escapes the
limitations of a lengthy academic paper or specific technical
prototypes. The fiction acts as a sort of “boundary object” –
between academics and practitioners, meaning different things to
different groups. As Star and Greisemer put it, boundary objects
are: “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs
and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust
enough to maintain a common identity across sites.” [7].
From an academic viewpoint design fictions that can be seen as a
way of experimenting with ideas and issues. Fictions are perhaps
not as heavyweight as an academic publication, without the
requirements of citation, verification and the like. This allows for
more speculative and potentially innovative thinking. Design
fictions can thus be used to illustrate and provoke ideas that are in
development, particularly where design is part of the ideas in
development. For industrial participants, design fiction is in turn a
venue where ideas can be experimented with and implications
discussed, without being seen necessarily as a comment on current
products or practices. Their ambiguity means that participants can
speculate without worrying about negative implications being
drawn for the present. Figure one is a demonstration of this from
the catalogue. On one side it talks to the way in which IKEA has
always moved ‘labour’ (such as construction and transpiration) to
the purchaser, allowing it to sell products for much cheaper. Yet,
on the other side, it also talks to an interest in ‘labour’, maker
culture and DIY. How would IKEA interact with those who want
to ‘hack’ and build variations on the NYFIKEN bookshelf? What
Figure 1: Bookshelf “levels of service” – something
between industrial and academic concerns
if personal fabrication is more widespread, would IKEA simply
sell plans and 3D cad models?
A second interesting issue about working together on design
fictions is how a design fiction can act as a piece of critique. The
relationship between design fiction and the (perhaps better known
in HCI) critical design illustrates this issue. It is not that design
fiction is without critique, and critical design is all about critique –
nor is it that organizations (commercial and public) are unable to
deal with critique as part of projects they work on. Rather what
matters is the form that critique takes, and how it can contribute to
a collaboration, rather than seeming as an “academic privileging”
that steps outside a specific situation [4].
While it is a broad and perhaps even contested term, critical
design has at its heart the subversion of status quo through the
deployment of irony and satire. In the work by Dunne & Raby [3]
that coined the term, there is an attempt to subvert design’s focus
on “the product” – the ways in which design usually takes for
granted its relationship with commerce, (over)-production,
consumption and the like. As Pierce et al put it, critical design is
an attempt to “question[s] the role of design in shaping our
everyday reality.” [5] Yet, as Pierce et al also point out, there is
increasing diversity in what is described as or subverts “critical
design” (Dunne & Raby themselves have moved more on to use
the term ‘speculative design’). Critique is still central to the
enterprise - in Bardzell & Bardzell's [1] use of the term, there is an
even more explicit connection with humanistic critical theory, and
cultural studies.
In contrast, design fiction is less clearly a critical enterprise. It has
a lineage is perhaps less in design (or even critical theory), but
rather in science fiction. As Bruce Sterling describes it, design
fiction is “when science fiction thinking opens itself to design
thinking” [8]. If good science fiction tells us not about the future
but about the present, then design fiction itself also reveals our
fears and problems in current time. Bleecker’s design fiction work
includes ‘catalogues’ of concepts that are simultaneously
uncomfortable, but at times also reassuring – concepts that paint a
story of a particular future, playing on our hopes and fears of the
present [2]. Critique is sublimated within other engagements,
humour; spectacle; aspiration; technological desire. This is not to
say that design fiction is without critique – as with science fiction
much of the work is clearly critical in intent. Yet it can go further
- design fictions can be possible but interesting, unusual but also
upsetting. Design fiction without critique is neutered – falling into
corporate publicity. Yet design fiction perhaps has more diverse
goals than critical design.
When working on design fiction with large, privately funded
companies and large, publically funded government organisations,
one question that we encountered is how critical do you want to
be? Or more specifically, what is the useful role of critique in
such collaborations: of technology, of futures, of contradictions in
the present, or – indeed – of the role of the company that is
participating in the project? In rethinking technology, it is hard to
avoid being critical to some extent. Thinking about different
futures involve looking for contradictions in current systems or
practices, or trends that may be benign or merely frustrating (such
as incompatibilities), but with benign potential. Yet being critical
might cause all sorts of problems in collaborations and even in
interaction. The first can come in working with those who might
be uncomfortable, or hostile, to this sort of critical thinking. An
inescapable part of corporate culture in nearly every organisation
is to avoid direct explicit public critique of that organisation itself.
This can conflict with a more critical intent.
Perhaps, more insidiously, there is also the question of how we
might end up (in advance) censoring our work so as to avoid a
perceived conflict. As we respond to ideas, and concepts the work
might simply never be guided in a critical direction, simply
replicating the worldviews of participants. Or there are times
when a direct critique might simply fail to gain purchase. One of
the very points of working with large non-academic organisations
is that they have power and influence. That power can come
through explicit legislation and policy (when working through
public sector bodies) or through an influence on what is made and
sold, or even just on the transmission of ideas that takes place in
forums outside academia. Collaborations offer the possibility of a
positive influence – but at some level this is reliant on
communication and personal relationships. Critique – if it takes
the wrong form, if it is clumsy or too brazen – can seem indulgent
or simply irrelevant. We might say that a specific comment or
investigation about an issue might lead to engagement and
reflection, whereas a broader critique could be summarily
rejected. Perhaps academic work should have little concern for
these issues. But research in conjunction with industry has the
potential to have a positive influence through and with different
organizations and public bodies. An important purpose of
industrial collaboration is to rejuvenate academic work by
patching it together with industrial concerns, and to rejuvenate
industrial work with new ideas and arguments.
One way we have sought to deal with this is by the use of
equivocality in our designs. Equivocality in design fiction
involves ideas that incorporate concepts that make the reader
uncomfortable. There is the aim of visualizing ideas that have
multiple meanings, that are presented in a straightforward way but
that leave room for different readings. Working with equivocality
lets us explore subversions that rather than acting as leaden
criticism, are more playful and open to different engagements.
This is a little like the use of homophonic puns in mandarin as a
way of subverting Internet censorship.
3. The catalogue
Moving onto our specific output - the catalogue enclosed here was
produced as a group effort bringing together collaborators from
public sector bodies, academic institutes, and major organisations
- including Stockholm City, IKEA and Ericsson. We worked
together over different concepts trying to establish possible
futures that highlighted the sorts of tensions that we though were
interesting to investigate, as well as productive in terms of
design.
Throughout the catalogue we attempted to mix the sort of
wholesome scenes that one encountered in a contemporary
catalogue, with possible subversions. So, on the first page we see
a typical gendered family scene - father away, while mother plays
with child. Yet the scene entails two subversions: the sofa is
Figure 2: How do we feel about IKEA selling living
organisms? What about a pricing model work where we need
to pay 9.99 per month for a lifetime subscription only?
watching what unfolds, collecting memories, and the father is
wearing a VR headset. This makes the scene perhaps a little bit
more shocking, the father is not merely attending to a different
activity, but they are in a different space – their vision glanced by
a memory recording sofa. Similarly, on pages 5 and 6, we see one
ongoing concern of IKEA play out in an unusual way. Here, we
have a storage cabinet, but one that mixes digital
recommendations, delivered by drones. What we see is a play
between a concern for storage in a digital world, with the rather
intrusive “analysis [of daily activities] for an accurate subscription
offer”.
At first glance, the catalogue then offers a rather cozy futuristic
vision, but if one looks at the copy instead one can read a more
equivocal vision: IKEA as not only the provider of the home, but
as a data collection entity. How would we feel about IKEA
replacing Google as the repository of our memories?
4. Conclusion
We only are at the beginning of experimenting with design fiction
and the role it can play in these collaborations. The enclosed
catalogue helped us start to explore new ways of collaborating
with industry, but has also been adopted for use in teaching by our
colleagues, as well as encouraging our industrial partners to pick
up the ideas and run their own design fiction events. Clearly, it
conveys research in different ways and lets us reach out. In the
enclosed catalogue you can see examples of the equivocality,
critique, and boundary objects in particular designs. Yet more
broadly, the opportunity here comes from the possibilities of
working with a new form for academic research – not just as a
new way of communicating research outcomes, but as a new
forum for communication and collaboration with a variety of
partners.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are collaborators in the Mobile Life Centre, as such
we also thank the host collaborating companies and organisations.
6. REFERENCES
1. Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell. 2015. Humanistic Hci.
Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics 8, 4: 1–
185.
2. Julian Bleecker. 2009. Design Fiction: A short essay on
design, science, fact and fiction. Near Future Laboratory 29.
3. Anthony Dunne. 2008. Hertzian tales: Electronic products,
aesthetic experience, and critical design. MIT Press.
Retrieved February 10, 2016 from
http://www.citeulike.org/group/7111/article/3508492
4. Michael Lynch. 2000. Against Reflexivity as an Academic
Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge. Theory, Culture
& Society 17, 3: 26–54.
http://doi.org/10.1177/02632760022051202
5. James Pierce, Phoebe Sengers, Tad Hirsch, Tom Jenkins,
William Gaver, and Carl DiSalvo. 2015. Expanding and
refining design and criticality in HCI. Proceedings of the 33rd
Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems, ACM, 2083–2092. Retrieved February 10, 2016 from
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702438
6. Ian Sommerville, Tom Rodden, Pete Sawyer, and Richard
Bentley. 1992. Sociologists can be suprisingly useful in
interactive systems design. In Proceedings of the HCI’92
Conference on People and Computers VII. pp 341–353.
7. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional
Ecology, `Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and
Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology,
1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19, 3: 387–420.
http://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003001
8. Bruce Sterling. 2005. Shaping Things (Mediaworks
Pamphlets). Retrieved February 10, 2016 from
http://www.citeulike.org/group/7111/article/548260
The smart
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NEWS
Experience the new IKEA
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TILLSAMMANS 12
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Enjoy the comfort
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See p. 8
Curated by: Designed by:
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NEAR FUTURE LABORATORY
SAN FRANCISCO
BARRY BROWN
MOBILE LIFE
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