Experiencing the Future Mundane: Configuring Design Fiction as Breaching Experiment

TL;DR

This paper presents a new interdisciplinary method using design fiction as a breaching experiment to reveal underlying assumptions affecting the acceptability and adoption of future technologies, demonstrated through a case study on smart media.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that configures design fiction as a breaching experiment to surface background expectancies impacting technology acceptance.

Findings

Revealed acceptability challenges through user engagement with the design fiction.

Demonstrated the method's viability with a case study on future media consumption.

Provided insights into how mundane actions influence technology adoption.

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel methodological approach for surfacing the acceptability and adoption challenges that confront future and emerging technologies from the perspective of mundane action, in which they will ultimately be embedded and used. This novel approach configures design fiction as a breaching experiment to surface taken for granted background expectancies that are fateful for acceptability and adoption. We explain the logic of this new interdisciplinary method and present a concrete case to demonstrate its viability: a design fiction called Experiencing the Future Mundane (EFM), which depicts a future world in which watching TV is driven by smart adaptive media. We explicate the design of the EFM, how it was configured to breach common sense knowledge and surface taken for granted background expectancies concerning how watching TV works and is expected to work, the acceptability and adoption challenges that emerge from user engagement with the experience, and how this novel approach may be adopted more broadly.