This observation is nothing new. But it’s essential to understand my continued interest in speculation and fiction. My challenge is how to construct and design an educational curriculum that develops the wide range of skills and knowledge it takes to be a designer, whilst opening up a space for our students to push the boundaries of our discipline. By focussing on the speculative and fictional, design is no longer constrained by the practical reality of todays material and economic restrictions. The part of our curriculum that concentrates on the fictional, pulls important parts of design practice into focus; narrative construction, user interactions, representations of affect, communication and contextualisation. We train designers to become fluent in the operational mechanics of their practice.
https://medium.com/@matthewward/design-fiction-as-pedagogic-practice-9b1fbba7ae2b