Design Philosophy, Design Research, Service Design, Sustainable Design, Transition Design

Does anyone know of any examples of trained writers working with designers on their scenarios?

There are odd difficulties around this. It's almost impossible to look for 'fiction for design' or 'design-oriented fiction' because searches are swamped with 'design fiction' in the Near Future Laboratory sense. (Tony's book is imaged as an example of the terminology I'm after.) And I am looking for more prosaic instances, or ones with more direct connection, than science-fiction inspired designing in the sense of Nathan Shedroff's _Make it So_. And more social (change) design oriented than futures-foresighting dominated.

The other difficulty is what to call this kind of 'briefed fiction' or 'instrumental fiction.' It is not just copy-writing or content-design precisely because what I am after are instances that really value the fiction craft: character, narrative, transformative arcs, etc. But it is constrained with an end beyond the writing itself, something might make it distasteful to many writerly writers. 

I am asking because it occurred to me that so much design, especially in social service design, depends on use-case scenarios. That means that the futures, the future products and serivces, that get built, are being briefed by scenarios produced mostly by designers themselves – practitioners who are not always accomplished writers or even big readers.

For instance, I am doing work at the moment on the design of a planning for ageing tool/services that is being informed by (research-based) scenarios. We really need rich, plausible fictions of people changing their minds about how they are living as they interact with this decision-support tool/service. I need a fiction-writer-for-hire to help. 

How different would the world be if it was being made toward what people trained and experienced in crafting possible situations came up with?

Cameron Tonkinwise

Design Studies, Transition Design, Service Design

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