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Designers: you need to read science fiction
To anticipate the needs of users of the future, you need to imagine the future.
Science fiction has long been the inspiration behind new leaps in scientific achievement. As I mentioned in a previous article about Star Trek predicting the future of user experience, Nebula Award-winning sci-fi writer Pamela Sargent called the genre, “the literature of ideas.” And we should treat it as such. This is why I think that more people in tech, especially UX professionals, need to embrace their inner nerd and get into science fiction. The genre has the capacity to open and expand your mind, permitting readers to speculate on, if not outright predict, the future.
Science fiction often appears to predict the future:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey had flat screened news tablets that precursor the iPad by 42 years
- Ray Bradbury described a floor cleaning device eerily similar to a Roomba in his haunting 1950 short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains”
- Bradbury also thought up earbuds or “seashells” in Farenheit-451
- We get the word “robot” from Czech author Karel Čapek’s play, “R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots)”
- Star Trek’s communication badges are notably similar to the now-infamous Humane AI pin…
This is why think tanks looking to the future often employ science fiction writers; their speculation into possible futures or even alternative presents can sometimes hit on what will be the next big thing. This isn’t to say that sci-fi writers are clairvoyant by any means. We still haven’t quite sussed out consumer-grade flying cars, after all. But in the words of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault,
“I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
Read, watch, play, and enjoy science fiction to open up some windows in your world.
