Design Fictioning of a Second-Order Kind: Runaway Cybernetics, Futures of Work, Possibilities of Engagement

In this paper, I propose second-order design fictioning as a way of reframing the hegemonic fictions built around technology, work, and design. These forms of progress fictions are further amplified by uncritical developments in cybernetic technologies that have a complex and often problematic relationship to discourses around the politics of innovation and acceleration. Projects related to the speculation of post-work futures within a design studio and seminar are used as a heuristic to engage broader theoretical questions on the reductive ways in which the question of changes in technologies (human-machine relationships) are addressed in the context of the transition imagination towards alternative work futures. Within these projects, engaging frictions, i.e., questions concerning difference and sense-making in sites of disruption, are further problematized. To define the notion of a second-order in design fictioning, the paper draws on modes of engaging systemic complexity as theorised within recent discussions in design cybernetics, critical cybernetics, and Gregory Bateson’s work on meta-communicational frames. Second-order design fictioning, as proposed here, delinks the better-known concept of design fiction—a methodological tool often used in the imagination of futures—from its preoccupation with objects, technology, and technocratically projected views of the future and innovation. It is hoped that second-order design fictioning would enable a better focus on the complex politics of the changing value frameworks (fictions) that drive these concepts.