Even money, the almighty bottom line, the ultimate reality check for American society, has tripped over its own infrastruc-tural blinders, and lost its ability to map value. The visionaries no longer know what to think—and, by no coincidence, the financiers can no longer place their bets.

I scarcely know what to do about this. As Charles Eames said, design is a method of action. Literature is a method of meaning and feeling. Hearteningly, I do know how I feel about this situation. I even have some inkling of what it means.

Rather than thinking outside the box—which was almost always a money box, quite frankly—we surely need a better understanding of boxes. Maybe some new, more general, creative project could map the limits of the imaginable within the contemporary technosocial milieu. Plug that imagination gap.

That effort has no 20th-century description. I rather doubt that it’s ever been tried. It seems to me like a good response to events. The winds of the Net are full of straws. Who will make the bricks?

conceptual walls—scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design. There is even “experience design,” which is surely the most imperial, most gaseous, most spectral form of design yet invented.

Experience design is closer in spirit to theater, poetry or even philosophy than it is to the older assembly line. What on earth isn’t “experience”? And what is not, in some sense, “interactive”? Experience designers are a tiny group of people with a radically universalized prospectus.

When science fiction was born from its radio-parts catalogs, design was also born as the streamlined handmaiden of industry. The earliest industrial designers, Norman Bel Geddes in particular, were much given to flamboyant sci-fi special-effects gestures: flying wings, giant dams, and future supercities.

But these two sister disciplines, born within the same decade and surely for similar reasons, soon parted ways. The sisters were distantly cordial; but they saw no common purpose. Design, which is industrial, has clients and consumers, while science fiction, an art form, has patrons and an audience.

No major designer ever dabbled in writing science fiction. Gaudy sci-fi never went in for stern modernist rationalism, the glum acceptance of material constraints, or the study of human ergonomics. These two visionary enterprises never shared a user base.

Until, that is, the Internet. When print began to dissolve, the industrial began to digitize. The consumers and the audience became the users, the keyboard-

clicking participants, the people formerly known as the audience.

Here in 2009, I find myself wondering hard about those older commonalities from the 1920s. The technoculture that we currently inhabit (it’s not the post-modern anymore, so we might haltingly call it a cyberneticized, globalized, liberal capitalism in financial collapse) well, it was neither rationally designed nor science-fictionally predicted.

Why is that? What happened? Why are we like this now? What next, for heaven’s sake? Can’t we do better?

We have entered an unimagined culture. In this world of search engines and cross-links, of keywords and networks, the solid smokestacks of yesterday’s disciplines have blown out. Instead of being armored in technique, or sheltered within subculture, design and science fiction have become like two silk balloons, two frail, polymorphic pockets of hot air, floating in a generally tainted cultural atmosphere.

These two inherently forward-looking schools of thought and action do seem blinkered somehow—not unimaginative, but unable to imagine effectively. A bigger picture, the new century’s grander narrative, its synthesis, is eluding them. Could it be because they were both born with blind spots, with unexamined assumptions hardwired in 80 years ago?

There is much thoughtful talk of innovation, of transformation, of the collaborative and the transdisciplinary. These are buzzwords, language that does not last. What we are really experiencing now is a massive cybernetic hemorrhage in ways of knowing the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce Sterling, author, jour-
nalist, editor, and critic,
was born in 1954. Best
known for his nine science
fiction novels, he also
writes a weblog. During 2005 he was the
“Visionary in Residence” at the Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena. In 2008 he
was the guest curator for the Share Festival
of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy,
and the Visionary in Residence at the
Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.He has
appeared in Time, Newsweek, The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times,
Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis,
Technology Review, Der Spiegel, La
Repubblica, and many other venues.

DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516021
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0500 $5.00