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Suppose the cautionary tale is read as a playbook?
The other day I was reading through a pre-print draft of a book I was asked to contribute to with an afterword. There were some essays referring to the canons of late twentieth-century science fiction — the era of cautionary dystopian tales. The worlds we're living in today often echo those speculative visions, raising questions about their relevance and impact.
And then I thought about Star Wars fans who cosplay Darth Vader and Stormtroopers and I was like — wait, those are the bad guys, right?
But there's something undeniably compelling about their aesthetic, their power, their presence, their little zippy-do Tie Fighters, long corridors with cool greeble panels with fun levers, theme park garbage chute rides..all before you see it as an undesireable representation of an brutal authoritarian galatic empire.
This got me wondering: what happens when cautionary tales become sources of inspiration rather than warnings? When dystopian fiction becomes a showcase for fascinating possibilities rather than outcomes to avoid?
There's something interesting happening in how we process speculative futures. When science fiction presents compelling visions — even dark ones — they can feel inevitable rather than conditional. The technology becomes the focus while the cautionary context fades. We see Minority Report's gesture interfaces and want to build them; we see Ready Player One's immersive worlds and want to create AR experiences, dispensing with the larger context and meaning.
What if we focused more on stories that don't just show us what could go wrong, but actively explore what could go right?
We tend to assume that traditional storytelling will shape how we think about technology's future. But those stories circulate in complicated ways, and "The Handmaid's Tale" isn't everyone's dystopia. The problem isn't just that dystopian warnings become instruction manuals; it's that written stories, however compelling, remain separate from the material world they aspire to inform.
Sometimes a story of possibility is best embedded in other kinds of "material" than prose — in things, ontological contrivances that do something while shaping consciousness in ways different from semantics strung together on the page.
This has been the focus of my practice — building systems and prototypes, creating tools for thinking about the future, designing experiences that help people imagine possible futures.
Take OMATA, the bicycle computer I spent nearly a decade developing. While the cycling world assumed computers meant plastic screens full of data, I asked myself: what if a computer could be circular, analog, beautiful? The product became an artifact from an alternative present where cycling remained visceral rather than quantified.
This wasn't just product development; it was speculative design made tangible. Every morning I had to reconstruct the fiction that cyclists wanted beauty over metrics. I was trying to be, in Ursula K. Le Guin's phrase, "a realist of a larger reality" — building toward a world that didn't yet exist but felt more human.
Stories are powerful tools for exploring possibilities and shaping imagination — and those "stories" don't have to be prose. They can be prototypes, experiences, systems. Whatever form shapes our understanding and opens our imagination.
I'm increasingly interested in creating narratives embedded in material — ontological furniture, as the objects and experiences and not just words that make reality reality — that help us navigate toward positive futures, stories that don't just warn us away from dystopia but actually light a path toward something worth building.
Read the full reflection ⇒
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