Resistance is Fertile: Design Fictions in Dystopian Worlds

Abstract

Current work on design fiction has discussed their use for personal reflection, sharing with collaborators, forming a public "vision" but with small numbers of participant readers. We wanted to explore a new way of using design fictions as a tool for discussion with large global audiences via social authoring web sights. To achieve this, we wrote a highly read, science-fiction novel called I'm a Cyborg's Pet (The Thinking Girl's Guide to Surviving a Robot Apocalypse), on an online, social, serial-writing website called Wattpad. We found our readers confounded our initial expectations of dystopian fiction.