*The way I have it figured, this stuff isn't "design fiction" but rather "device art."
*I rather like device art. Sometimes it's pleasant to see some wacky, aestheticized machinery with nothing diegetic going on.
http://photomediationsmachine.net/2013/04/27/devices-for-progress/
"Devices for Progress is a series of photographic images of what appear to be makeshift machines, situated within a workshop or design laboratory environment. The machines have been photographed in order to show off their appearance, design aesthetic and individual component make-up in the best possible way. The photographs offer the viewer ideas of actual potential objects that are visually anything but cutting edge: instead, they are clumsy and awkward. Their mechanical form indexes the body that has produced them. This kind of referentiality is absent from the streamlined tablet-like forms of contemporary mobile phones, laptops, iPods and car navigation systems. In the majority of contemporary technological and media devices the mechanical and the analogue have been displaced by the virtual interface of the LCD display, which has become central in our commodified world of personal entertainment and multiple labour- and time-saving devices.
"This project was inspired by a number of visits I made to various science and engineering museums in order to investigate the design of small electronic consumer devices. The research trips were unsuccessful, but only in the sense that my original expectations had not been met. I found that the objects on display in most cases looked exactly like the final product that would then be presented to the market. I had expected to see unfinished hotchpotches of machines, exposed working components and a cacophony of tangled cables. I was also hoping for a look beyond, or behind, the scenes of the design process and into a space manufacturers might ordinarily keep from public view. Instead, the objects that I came across were merely empty shells, made only to demonstrate the aesthetic of the product’s design.
"As a result of my disappointment I decided to create my own inventions in order to recreate some of the imagery that existed in my imagination...."
(((This "Photomediations" site is quite interesting – it's either a magazine that become a gallery or a gallery that became a magazine or maybe neither.)))
