Shuichiro Ogawa
日本語

Notes · updated 2026-09-22

What Do the "X Fiction" Methods Think, and What Are They Expected to Do?

This note reads academic work on science fiction prototyping, design fiction, critical and speculative design, diegetic prototypes, speculative fiction, experiential futures, and social fiction, asking three things: where each idea came from, how the ideas differ, and what adopters have expected of them.

Contents (6)
  1. Four Places of Origin
  2. What Differs
  3. What Adopters Have Expected
  4. Where Expectations and Ideas Diverge
  5. What Remains Unknown
  6. Footnotes

Proposals for futures workshops list names such as science fiction prototyping, design fiction, and speculative design. Each is introduced as a way to “use fiction to think about the future,” and they are often treated as synonyms. I assumed the names differed and the content was mostly the same.

Reading what each originator wrote, though, shows that the job expected of the fiction sometimes points in opposite directions. One method was born as a tool to bring fiction closer to products and innovation; another was born to keep a distance from the path to production. Which one a workshop picks changes what the participants are meant to take home at the end.

This note organizes academic literature on where the “X Fiction” methods came from, how they differ, and what adopters have expected of them. Sources were gathered across OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, J-STAGE, and others, and the screened works are recorded in the corpus. What effects these methods actually had on participants and organizations is covered separately in What Do Science Fiction Prototyping and Design Fiction Actually Do?.

Four Places of Origin

The similarly named methods came from at least four separate places: the meeting of SF and technology development, design critique at the RCA (Royal College of Art), futures studies, and literary genre theory.

From SF and Technology Development

The diegetic prototype is a term the film scholar Kirby introduced in a 2010 paper. Kirby argued that when film creators, including science consultants, depict future technologies, those depictions demonstrate a technology’s need, viability, and benevolence to large audiences. The technologies exist only in the story world (the diegesis), but in that world they are shown as ordinary working objects. Kirby’s interest lay in how such depictions connect to real-world funding and the building of prototypes.

Science fiction prototyping (SFP) is the method proposed by Johnson. In a 2009 Intelligent Environments paper, Johnson introduced science fiction prototypes as a craft of combining current scientific research, theory, and practice with the fictional construct of the science fiction story. The same abstract closes with a challenge to use science fiction prototypes to foster innovation and explore the boundaries of modern science. The starting point is technology, and the destination is innovation.1

From Design Critique at the RCA

Critical design is an approach Dunne and Raby developed at the RCA. In an FAQ on their own site, they write that the term was first used in Dunne’s Hertzian Tales (1999) and later in Design Noir (2001). The same FAQ defines critical design as using “speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life,” and names its opposite “affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo.” Asked what it is for, they answer, “Mainly to make us think.”

Later, in Speculative Everything (2013), the two broadened this practice under the name speculative design. Auger, who studied at the same RCA, argued that speculative design serves two purposes: to enable us to think about the future, and to critique current practice. Auger called the means by which designs engage their audience the “perceptual bridge,” and argued that careful management of the speculation (how technology, aesthetics, behaviour, and function are handled) decides whether a proposal succeeds.

From interviews with critical designers, Malpass identified satire, rationality, and narrative as salient concepts and divided critical practice into associative, speculative, and critical design. What separates the three is the satiric device each uses.

Design fiction is a term the SF author Sterling coined in 2005 (per the abstract of Lindley and Coulton 2015). Bleecker popularized it in a 2009 essay, in which he introduced Kirby as “the guy who coined this phrase ‘diegetic prototypes’” and pointed to Sterling’s essay in interactions. The line quoted as the de facto definition of design fiction, “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change,” comes from a 2012 interview with Sterling. Coulton, Lindley, Sturdee, and Stead (2017) traced the definition to that interview and then argued that design fiction is a “world building” activity with no inherent link to narrative or storytelling. Lindley and Coulton (2015) noted that while the term is widely used in HCI, it is inherently ambiguous.

From Futures Studies

Experiential futures is a term the futurist Candy proposed in his 2010 doctoral dissertation. Candy defined an experiential scenario as the manifestation of one or more fragments of an ostensible future world in any medium, including image, artifact, and performance. Its purpose is to enable deeper thought and discussion about one or more futures than textual and statistical representations of scenarios allow. Candy placed this practice at the intersection of futures studies, design, and politics. His acknowledgments name Bleecker and Sterling and mention guest lectures in design programs run by Dunne and Raby. The concept was made in the same years as the design lineage, in exchange with the same people.

The picture of possibility as a cone also comes from futures studies. Candy based his cone on the diagram on page 16 of Voros (2003) and noted that Voros’s diagram derives from Hancock and Bezold (1994). He also wrote that Henchey (1978) added “plausible” to possible, probable, and preferable.2

The merging of futures and design was acknowledged from the field’s side when Candy and Potter, introducing the Journal of Futures Studies special issue “Design and Futures,” wrote that the two fields are merging through dialogue and experimentation. At that meeting point, world building became a bridging concept. Zaidi (2019) wrote that worlds provide detailed contextual rule sets that develop a larger reality extending beyond a single story. Zaidi cites von Stackelberg and McDowell’s (2015) definition of worldbuilding as “the creation of imaginary worlds with coherent geographic, social, cultural, and other features.”3

From Literary Genre Theory

Speculative fiction is the name of a literary genre, not a method. In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oziewicz sorted the term’s three historical meanings: a subgenre of SF dealing with human rather than technological problems, a genre opposed to SF in its exclusive focus on possible futures, and a supercategory for all genres that depart from imitating the “consensus reality” of everyday experience. Oziewicz suggests theorizing it not by a rigorous definition but as a “meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory,” defined by resemblance to prototypical examples rather than by clear boundaries. Where design fiction and science fiction prototyping “make and use” fiction, speculative fiction is a word for classifying works already written.

Social fiction has two usages from different lineages. On the academic side, Leavy published Re/Invention: Methods of Social Fiction in 2022, treating creative writing grounded in social research as a qualitative research method. The publisher describes the book as “the first comprehensive guide to what social fiction is and how to write it.” The other usage is Yunus’s, in talks and interviews, as a call to write society’s future first as a story. This search found no academic work that defines or examines Yunus’s usage as a method.

What Differs

Placed side by side, the four origins show that the methods differ less in what the fiction makes than in where the made thing is meant to go.

At one end are methods that want fiction to move toward production and innovation. Johnson’s science fiction prototyping names fostering innovation as its aim, and Kirby discussed diegetic prototypes as a route to real funding and prototypes. At the other end are methods that want to keep a distance from production and leave a question open. Dunne and Raby named the opposite of critical design “affirmative design,” and Galloway and Caudwell (2018) wrote that “rather than following design’s traditional problem-solving imperative, critical and speculative design promise to interrupt the status quo and challenge audiences to imagine otherwise.”

Pierce (2021) put this difference into theoretical terms. Pierce called the view that design’s purpose is to converge toward and ideally arrive at production “progressional,” and called the view that radically relaxes teleological assumptions and resists further progression and final production “frictional.” Both, Pierce argued, rest on “prefiguration,” the idea that designs are partial, provisional actualizations of possible futures. Applying these terms, science fiction prototyping, with its aim of innovation, sits on the progressional side, and critical design, which refuses to reinforce the status quo, sits on the frictional side. Design fiction falls in between, and the ambiguity Lindley and Coulton pointed out can be read as coming from its use in both directions.

There are also attempts to group the methods under a larger frame. Tharp and Tharp (2013) divided product design practice into four fields: commercial, responsible, experimental, and discursive. They proposed discursive design as “tools for thinking” that raise awareness of debatable issues of psychological, sociological, and ideological consequence, and as an umbrella category that includes critical design. Tharp and Tharp also distinguished a terminal form, where the designer’s job ends once the object is released, from an instrumental form, where researchers use discursive objects like probes to elicit responses and a values-based exchange. DiSalvo’s adversarial design draws on Mouffe’s political theory and aims to produce the experience of contestation and agonism through design (as summarized in Kiem’s 2013 review).

These distinctions are not theoretically settled. Johannessen, Keitsch, and Pettersen (2019) wrote that “the theoretical fundament of SCD [speculative and critical design] is feeble, and concepts and methods are upheld of mere examples.” Schimpf et al. (2026), covered in the companion note, counted as many as 17 SF-related methods. The distinctions between the ideas are not as clear as the number of names suggests.

What Adopters Have Expected

Apart from how the methods think, there are the expectations that adopting organizations and researchers state. The literature shows five expectations, one per setting.

Organizational Foresight

In companies and public organizations, SF is expected to be a tool for anticipating and preparing for the future. Johnson tied science fiction prototypes to fostering innovation. According to Hiltunen and Huhtinen (2024), armies and defense organizations in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and NATO have begun using SF to anticipate and prepare for future wars. They analyzed the 12 narratives in NATO’s report Visions of Warfare 2036, found the stories fairly similar to one another, and created a card tool for producing more diverse scenarios. Kymäläinen (2016) introduced science fiction prototyping as a thought-provoking method for arousing discussion within and between emerging technology research and foresight.4

Anticipation in Responsible Research and Innovation

In technology governance, fiction has been positioned as a tool of anticipation. Guston (2014) defined anticipatory governance as “a broad-based capacity extended through society that can act on a variety of inputs to manage emerging knowledge-based technologies while such management is still possible,” and wrote that it motivates building capacities in foresight, engagement, and integration. Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013) named four dimensions of responsible innovation: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness. Neither work is about fiction itself. As Stahl et al. (2014), covered in the companion note, presented a science fiction prototype of a care robot as an instance of RRI, fiction is brought in as a way to make the “anticipation” of this framework concrete.

For government, Kimbell and Vesnić-Alujević (2020) argued that foresight and design approaches produce a capacity for future uncertainties to be made visible and graspable, opening up participation and reflexivity in public policy discussions.

Eliciting Values in HCI

In HCI research, fiction is expected to draw out people’s values about technologies that do not yet exist. Wong, Mulligan, Van Wyk, Pierce, and Chuang (2017) argued that critical, speculative, and value-centered design approaches can elicit reflections on social values early in product development, and used a workbook of speculative design fictions in interviews with graduate students training as future technology professionals. Wong, Van Wyk, and Pierce (2017) started from the novel The Circle and used design fiction to explore social, technical, and legal configurations around sensing technologies.

Tanenbaum, Pufal, and Tanenbaum (2016) listed three things fiction allows as a research tool: adopting different intellectual commitments and values about the future and exploring their consequences; articulating those consequences to a broader public in a form more readily understood than a research paper; and insulating researchers from the emotional weight of proximal dystopias by creating space to “play with” alternative visions.

In public engagement, Schuijer, Broerse, and Kupper (2021) tried a format in which citizens collaboratively prototype and write stories, aiming to break out of engagement routines centered on expert knowledge, cognitive exchange, risk discourse, and static understandings of public opinion.

Ethics and Futures Education

In education, the expectations are ethical deliberation and the ability to handle futures. Orchard and O’Gorman (2024), against the background of harms from the tech industry, called for “more rigorous ethical deliberation in the engineering design workflow” and reported two interventions bringing critical design methods into the education of future tech developers. They describe critical design as “an arts-based research practice that resists unreflective technological progress.”

UNESCO’s Futures Literacy states a broader expectation. Transforming the Future (2018), edited by Miller, uses Futures Literacy as a tool to define the understanding of anticipatory systems and processes, and presents evidence from more than 30 Futures Literacy Laboratories.

Imagination by Marginalized Communities

In participatory design, fiction is expected to be a means for marginalized people to imagine their own futures. Bray and Harrington (2021) noted that speculative participatory design methods help marginalized groups imagine futures, but that HCI still lacked research probes considering the lived experiences of Black and brown communities, and so developed method cards from an Afrofuturist lens. The Detroit workshops of Dillahunt et al. (2023), covered in the companion note, belong to this line as well.

Where Expectations and Ideas Diverge

Matching the five expectations against the methods’ origins reveals a mismatch. In this note’s reading, organizational foresight is a progressional expectation, while ethics education, eliciting values, and marginalized imagination are closer to frictional thinking. When a frictional method is brought into a progressional setting, the method’s thinking and the setting’s demands collide.

That collision has been observed in corporate collaboration. Ringfort-Felner et al. (2023) worked with an automobile manufacturer for more than a year exploring the near future of self-driving cars through design fiction, producing 24 artifacts. They report “a trend toward affirmative rather than speculative design,” driven by product-centricity and the need to justify process and outcome through concrete innovation. Speculation raised interesting questions about technological futures, but turning them into concrete design implications remained a challenge.

A similar tension is reported in public engagement. Schuijer et al. warned of “the designer fallacy” as a pitfall in which prototyping reproduces techno-scientific framings and obstructs critical reflection on technological directions and implications. Bray et al. (2022) interviewed 27 community design practitioners about an Afrofuturist toolkit and found tensions between the desire for imaginative design practice and the immediacy of social issues.

Critique is also aimed at the frictional methods themselves. In his review of Speculative Everything, Tonkinwise (2014) criticized the “shopping” framework and taste regime underlying Dunne and Raby’s arguments and projects. Kiem (2013) wrote of DiSalvo’s Adversarial Design that it is hard to see how political design will make a difference beyond “the self-perpetuating world of research labs, design galleries, seminars run by clever designers, and more books like Adversarial Design.” The SpeculativeEdu overview (Mitrović, Hanna, and Helgason 2021) collected critiques of speculative design: that it is “privileged and Eurocentric,” that it stays inside museums and galleries, and that once appropriated by corporations it returns to supporting the status quo.5 On the education side, Jennische and Sörbom (2022) analyzed UNESCO’s Futures Literacy as resting on a premise that treats anticipation as a fundamental capacity of biological life, an ethical substance that can be worked on and self-controlled, and examined it critically as governing at the individual level.

The further frictional methods move away from the logic of production, the more they are criticized for staying inside galleries and research. When they step into progressional settings, they are pulled back toward affirming the status quo. The mismatch between expectations and ideas can be read less as a wrong choice of method and more as a sign that the methods are pulled between these two directions.

What Remains Unknown

  • Judging direction: The progressional/frictional distinction is Pierce’s theoretical framing, and few studies describe which direction a given workshop or organizational adoption was designed for. In this corpus, only Ringfort-Felner et al. traced how adoption-time expectations matched what was actually taken away.
  • Primary source for the SFP definition: The standard description, “short stories, movies, or comics based on real technology that explore its implications,” circulates widely, but in Johnson’s own words this search confirmed only the 2009 paper’s abstract. The text of the 2011 book was not read.
  • Academic standing of social fiction: No study was found linking Leavy’s social fiction as a qualitative method with Yunus’s social fiction as a call, nor any examining Yunus’s usage as a method.
  • Japanese-language research: There are a few peer-reviewed Japanese papers on science fiction prototyping (see the companion note), but this search (J-STAGE and web search) found no peer-reviewed work discussing the lineage of the concepts or the differences between the methods.

Returning to the workshop proposal at the start, the listed names are not synonyms. A proposal that picks science fiction prototyping expects fiction to move toward products and innovation; one that picks critical or speculative design expects to step away from production and keep a question open. When one workshop expects both, which direction wins, and whether a design can hold both, is still open. Whether each expectation was actually met is the subject of What Do Science Fiction Prototyping and Design Fiction Actually Do?.

References

All accessed 2026-09-22.

Footnotes

  1. Attempts to convey the social threats of technology through SF short stories predate Johnson. In a 2004 document for UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum, Chin, Callaghan, et al. used a short story to present issues of pervasive computing (not peer reviewed). ↩

  2. It is often said that Dunne and Raby used the PPPP cone in Speculative Everything, but this search could not check the book’s text. In an exhibition text created in 2010 and hosted on their own website (“Between Reality and the Impossible,” p. 131), however, they introduce a diagram dividing futures into probable, preferable, plausible, and possible as the work of “the futurologist Stuart Candy.” The cone’s lineage here follows the notes in Candy’s dissertation. ↩

  3. The von Stackelberg and McDowell definition was confirmed both through Zaidi’s quotation and directly in the original, at the opening of the introduction (Journal of Futures Studies 20(2), p. 25). A related but distinct definition, of “storyworld” rather than “worldbuilding,” appears on p. 32 of the same article. ↩

  4. The publisher of the Athens Journal of Technology & Engineering, where Kymäläinen’s paper appeared, is ATINER, which is listed on (a mirror of) Beall’s List of potential predatory publishers. This is a publisher-level listing, not an assessment of this paper’s review process; this note therefore uses the paper only as an illustrative example, and the corpus flags it for quality. ↩

  5. Another chapter of the same book names the charge of privilege as the most common criticism of critical and speculative design and cites an essay by Prado de O. Martins and Vieira de Oliveira (2014) as its source. That essay is a non-peer-reviewed piece on Medium, and its text could not be reached in this search. ↩

Author: Shuichiro Ogawa (Design Researcher / Consultant) About me →