was unique in its own vision and portrayal of life in the future, but each of them was also extraordinarily good at capturing the human drama of the future. These stories were not about technology, they were about the complex and fascinating lives of their characters. Technology was simply a part of the drama.
In the collection, English science fiction writer Scarlett Thomas’ story, The Drop, gives us a portrait of a family in a world that is mundane and familiar yet ingenious in its technological connections. German author Markus Heitz’s Blink of an Eye is a fascinating cautionary tale, pitting our human wants and desires against our ability to construct a future that we may not want to live in. American Douglas Rushkoff’s Last Day of Work tells us about Dr. Leon Spiegel’s last day of work, literally the last human to work. With intelligence and foresight, Rushkoff ultimately challenges what it means to be human. And finally, England’s Ray Hammond’s The Mercy Dash gives us a couple’s pulse-pounding break-neck race to save the life of a loved one. It is a race that is both helped and hindered by a complex landscape of devices, sensors and connections.
These stories ultimately show us that the stories of our future are not about technology, megatrends or predictions. They show us that the future is about people. By building these visions for the future, we can explore the innovations that Intel is building in our labs today and imagine them in real-life situations tomorrow.
But I think SF prototyping is a bit more important than that. Remember what I said before that the future is not set … that the future is made everyday by the actions of people? I truly believe this. I also believe that it is incredibly important that we are all active participants in the future. What kind of future do we want to live in? What are we afraid of ? What should our future look like all over the world? Well, if we are the ones who control our future, then we should do something about it!
Creating SF prototypes, writing stories, making movies and drawing comics about the future are one of those things that people can do to actually change the future. Think about the power of science fiction to capture people’s imagination and change the way we think. WarGames was just one of the science fiction stories that did that for me when I was a kid. If we can capture people’s imaginations and get us all talking about the future, then we can affect that future, we can build it by what we care doing today. Your future is truly in your hands.
“SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?”: WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM THIS BOOK
The idea of using science fiction as a prototype or development tool for the future is a pretty new idea. Certainly, science fiction and science fact have had long and fruitful relationship in the past. Science fiction stories and movies have inspired generations of scientists, engineers and developers. Similarly, scientific breakthroughs and technology innovation have revved up the imaginations of writers, filmmakers and artists.
In their 2012 book, Make it So, authors Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel delve into the relationship between interface design in science fiction and the real world. Shedroff is the program chair for the California College of Arts’ MBA in Design Strategy program, and Noessel is Director of interaction design at Cooper in San Francisco. Their book is an in-depth and scholarly analysis of the technology and user interfaces (UI) which have been developed and used in science fiction film and television. They look at how scifi interfaces have changed through time and what we can learn from them.
One fun and thoughtful example can be found in how George Lucas’ Star Wars uses holograms. The production designers’ use of holographic technology (in academic circles they are more accurately called “volumetric displays”) can tell us, the audience, a lot about not only the Empire and the Jedi technology but also their social order. In turn, this gives us some clues about what it might be like to work for the Empire as opposed to the Jedi. But on a more serious level, we can also learn what we should and should not do when we are designing social technologies; whether they be volumetric displays or simply a video call. If you have not seen the Star Wars movies recently, I will try to fill in a little of the story, but really you should just watch them again.
In Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, when the villain of the movie, Darth Vader, a Dark Lord of the Sith and leader of the Empire’s Imperial star fleet, calls his boss and Sith Master Emperor Palpatine, the Emperor is represented by a massive, room-sized hologram of his head. We can only see the Emperors head and it looms over Vader. There is obviously a serious chain of command when you work for the Empire. It is imposing and quite scary.
In contrast to this, in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, when we see the Jedi council meeting, it includes some holograms of Jedis attending remotely. Each and every hologram is their natural size. The Jedi take pains to make sure that the holograms of the council match their egalitarian principles. Powerful Jedi master, Yoda, is his usual small self, and Jedi Master Mace Windu, played by American actor Samuel L. Jackson, remains his usual six-foot three-inch height. This shows us that when you are a Jedi, you are who you are. There is no hierarchy, and all are equal.
Shedroff and Noessel’s book is filled with insights for both professional designers and science fiction movie buffs. Also, in the book, the authors have a great real-world example of how science fiction and science fact have influenced each other.
In 2000, Douglas Caldwell, an engineer with the US Army Topographic Engineering Center, went to see the film X-Men by his teenaged son. He wasn’t really a fan of science fiction, but while watching he saw something extraordinary that changed the direction his work. In a scene, the X-Men mutants are gathered around a 3D “pin” map big enough for all to see the representation of their plan to thwart the villain Magneto. As they describe the mission and the coordination needed, the map shifts to reveal different scales, topologies, and locations, as needed.
This isn’t a unique theme in science fiction, but these kinds of collaborative map tools are usually depicted as visualizations (sometimes holographic, sometimes projected on a flat surface, and sometimes screen-based). In X-Men, however, the map is three-dimensional and rendered as solids constantly shifting (as if each solid pixel was a magnetically controlled metal cube).
What was astonishing to Mr. Caldwell was that this interface, in front of him, was a more advanced vision for what he was in charge of developing. One of the responsibilities of the US Army Topographic Engineering Center is to provide generals in the field with “sand tables,” 3D representations of terrain in the theater of war that helps generals and other military personnel to coordinate military tactics. These devices are descendants of actual tables filled with sand that could be built up to mimic actual terrain. More advanced versions were needed to allow complex actions to be planned without hauling heavy and bulky equipment around the world.
When Mr. Caldwell saw the 3D table in X-Men, he instantly saw a solution he had never considered. He knew that the technology in the film was fantasy but he also surmised that the user experience was valid. At least, in this very limited snapshot, it worked for him and he tho.
What is different about SF prototypes is that they endeavor to create science fiction developed specifically on science fact as a way to inspire a conversation about the future and ultimately explore the implications of that science on the everyday lives of people. In this way, an SF prototype is a tool that can help us build better technology and sometimes practically speed up the development of hardware and software (more about that in Chapter 7).
In WarGames, Joshua the AI asked, “Shall we play a game?” SF prototypes are a kind of game; a thought experiment that imagines what would really happen if … What would happen if this technology truly went wrong? What would happen if everyone on the planet had access to this? What’s the best thing that could happen? What are the legal, ethical
