Examples of Applied Sci-Fi: Design Fiction Story Contests, Anthologies, Practitioners, and More
Twitter is sometimes a great place to collect things — but also a horrible tool for finding the old things you’ve collected. I remembered this last weekend when I was attending Social Science Foo Camp, one of O’Reilly Conferences’ celebrated “unconferences.” While there I organized a session on “Applied Sci-Fi: Science Fiction as Tool, Influence, Warning,” which was a blast — especially considering that such interesting people as Kim Stanley Robinson, one of my very favorite speculative fiction writers, and Tom Kalil, former head of science and technology policy in the Obama administration who used sci-fi as a foresight tool at the White House, chose to show up and participate in the conversation.
As I planned the session I remembered I’d done a few information-dense tweet-storms last year about applied sci-fi that contained a lot of relevant content that I could draw on. It was kind of a pain to dig those threads up but now that I have, I figured I’d post them here so I never have to go hunting again — and hopefully they’ll be of as much interest to you nerds as they are to this nerd.
The first thread is one I was inspired to pull together during the April 2019 We Robot conference at the University of Miami, when Ryan Calo and Stephanie Ballard of the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab presented a paper on deploying strategic foresight and design fiction techniques as a tool for thinking about the future of tech policy. In that thread, I collected a wide range of examples of two recent trends in the realm of applied sci-fi: short story contests soliciting sci-fi about “the future of [X],” and relatedly, anthologies of design fiction focused on the future of particular topics or technologies.
The second thread came a month later, when I had the pleasure of visiting the offices of DXLabs in San Francisco, a design consultancy that specializes in using science fiction as a tool for startups to refine their visions of the future. I was motivated to tweet other examples of individuals and companies that specialize in design fiction and sci-fi prototyping — applied sci-fi practitioners, if you will.
I’ve included both threads below, as well as including some of the more helpful replies and suggestions from other Twitter users. I’m continuing to track the growing trend of sci-fi being deliberately applied as a tool for thinking about the future, so if you have examples I haven’t listed here, please feel free to add a response to either of these threads over on Twitter! And please follow me there and here on Medium if you find this sort of thing interesting, because I’m hoping that there will be some fun sci-fi-related collaborations coming out of that Foo camp conversation for me to announce in the coming year.
THREAD 1, PART 1: EXAMPLES OF “FUTURE OF [X]” SCI-FI SHORT STORY CONTESTS
THREAD 1, PART 2: EXAMPLES OF DESIGN FICTION ANTHOLOGIES
THREAD 1, PART 3: REPLIES AND SUGGESTIONS
Here are some additional examples offered by other Twitter users…
THREAD 2: EXAMPLES OF APPLIED SCI-FI PRACTITIONERS
THREAD 1, PART 2: REPLIES AND SUGGESTIONS
Here are some additional examples offered by other Twitter users…
And that’s it for now! Again, if you have any great examples that weren’t included, please head over to Twitter to add to the replies — and I’ll also add them here!
