Design Ideation Through Speculative Fiction: Foundational Principles and Exploratory Study

Abstract

The objective of this study is to position speculative fiction as a broader framework to stimulate, facilitate, and study engineering design ideation. For this, we first present a comprehensive and detailed review of the literature on how fiction, especially science fiction, has played a role in design and decision-making. To further strengthen the need for speculative fiction for idea stimulation, we further prototype and study a prototype workflow that utilizes excerpts from speculative fiction books as textual stimuli for design ideation. Through a qualitative study of this workflow, we gain insights into the effect of textual stimuli from science fiction narratives on design concepts. Our study reveals that the texts consisting of the terms from the design statement or closely related to the problem boost the idea generation process. We further discover that less directly related stimuli may encourage out-of-the-box and divergent thinking. Using the insights gained from our study, we pose critical questions to initiate speculative fiction-based design ideation as a new research direction in engineering design. Subsequently, we discuss current research directions and domains necessary to take the technical, technological, and methodological steps needed for future research on design methodologies based on speculative fictional inspiration. Finally, we present a practical case to demonstrate how an engineering design workflow could be operationalized by investigating a concrete example of the design of automotive user interfaces (automotive-UI) through the lens of speculative fiction.