Beyond Content: Leaning on the Poetics of Defamiliarization in Design Fictions

Literary approaches to design fictions, though previously theorized to be diverse in form and content, often fall within narrow stylistic and content boundaries such as speculative abstracts, memos, and studies. By drawing on a rich history of science fiction criticism, we advocate for literary design fictions that diverge from what is commonplace in HCI and design research. We foreground our paper with a discussion of the poetics of science fiction, and their relationship to current design fiction practices. Specifically, we highlight how the poetics of a design fiction can work to familiarize or defamiliarize readers from the imagined world presented. We thus argue that considerations of poetics, specifically how they work to (de)familiarize readers of design fictions, enrich understanding of design fictions as a research method. We then provide and discuss three design fictions in the forms of poetry and flash fiction, which fictionalize anthropomorphism in AI and AI explainability, AI assistants and AI privacy, and the relationship between AI and human autonomy. This paper makes two contributions: 1) a poetics-based framework that broadens current understandings of written design fictions and 2) three design fictions that speculate on the future of human-AI interaction.