Design Fiction Case Study: “The Milano Blackout”
Context
In November 2019, during a design fiction workshop conducted at Politecnico Di Milano, our cohort of graduate service design students got challenged to save the future of our humanity from a catastrophe.
We were given a fictional story called the “Milano Blackout.” The story was about a mysterious series of electricity breakdowns occurring in different cities worldwide. According to the scenario, no one could explain the occurrence of the breakdowns, and once they happened, no one knew how long they would last. One of the cities affected by the breakdown was beautiful Milano. One Sunday morning, a blackout suddenly covered the city, and from that moment on, people had to continue living without electricity.
Goals
The goal of the workshop was to come up with sustainable energy and electricity generation method that could help the citizens of Milan adapt to the new world deprived of light, communication, heat, and many other things that we now take for granted.
Approach and Process
Our cohort consisting of 24 students, was divided into 6 groups of 4 people. All groups started with writing brief personal stories/anecdotes and putting them within the scenario of the “Milano Blackout.” All students then shared their stories within their groups and identified some common “themes” in the stories. Each group then chose a topic that, in some form, appeared in the stories of all the group members. From this point on, each group was to address the general challenge from the perspective of their “theme”.
In our group, the common theme was the mental health impact of the post-blackout catastrophe. All our group members had some stories that were somehow related to post-traumatic stress, loss, deprivation, and sufferings from the pressure to have massive lifestyle changes to adapt to the new world. Considering this, our narrowed-down challenge was to find ways of generating energy and helping people maintain mental stability when faced with a shocking permanent change.
To make our context more concrete and to bring the story to life, we created a protagonist, Alberto, and re-imagined the “Milano Blackout” scenario imagining and constructing the life of our protagonist one year after the event. We created two scenarios: a dystopian scenario and a utopian one. According to the dystopian scenario, Alberto would fail to overcome the stress imposed on him by the catastrophic event and would commit suicide. According to the utopian scenario, Alberto managed to adapt to the new world by adjusting his lifestyle and finding new sources of happiness.
In our process, first, we brainstormed with solution-oriented “What if?” questions, then used the “Brainwriting 6–3–5” ideation tool. We analyzed, clustered, and combined the solutions into a single solution that answered the question:
What if “Mother Nature” came to Alberto’s rescue?
After agreeing upon the direction of our solution, we dived into desk research. In particular, we got inspiration from some historical and biblical stories of using animals as tools for communication. We also tried to get more technical by looking at the environmental specifics of the target location and the technological equivalents that could enable the creation of a feasible solution.
No design process is complete without prototyping, right?
In the prototyping stage, we decided to have a hands-on, experimental approach and made three prototypes in an iterative process. Each of the prototypes illustrated a different aspect of the solution.
Outcomes
Our solution was to generate energy from the movement of birds’ wings. Moreover, identifying that some of the mental challenges that our protagonist faced were caused by the deprivation of digital communication methods, our “energy generator birds” were designed to provide Wi-Fi signals for communication and, through their vocal tract, to release certain Alpha waves that could help the protagonist enter into a meditative state. The mechanism for energy generation was inspired by the technology underlying kinetic watches. The idea of Wi-Fi generation through mini wearable kinetic adapters was inspired by another existing concept — Li-Fi (connection through light). In a way, our definition of energy generation had enhanced: besides electricity, it also incorporated the generation of “mental energy”, which is essential for the survival of humans.
At the end of the workshop, we presented our three prototypes: the lego construction of the post-blackout Milano with our new technology, the material prototype illustrating the “nuts and bolts” of the technology, and the storytelling video summarizing the context, the problem and the solution based on our protagonist’s pre- and post- blackout life.
In our pre-solution phases, we had imagined two scenarios for our protagonist — a dystopian world, where being unable to adjust to the post-blackout world, Alberto died, and a utopian world, where a solution was devised that facilitated the adjustment and Alberto overcame the stress and got energized. With our solution, we were aimed at pushing forward the
Challenges and Learnings
The workshop perfectly illustrated how using fictional stories and adding actual personal experience can help ground designers by giving them context but, at the same time, keeping the space open for crazy and innovative ideas. Although the “Milano Blackout” seemed far from reality, in our post-project reflections, we realized that some of the environmental issues we have today can potentially result in a similar scenario if we do not try to be proactive today. We started to speculate more on the role of designers in defining the future. The COVID-19 pandemic shook the world a few months after the project re-confirmed the learning and made the scenario appear as a prophecy.
On the other hand, the workshop reconfirmed my belief in the power of visualization as a communication tool. In many of my previous projects in international groups, I noticed that a lot of time got wasted on discussions before reaching a shared understanding of project goals. In this workshop, spending little time talking and much time doing (prototyping), we reached a state where each member found his/her role, and we co-created something that brought a sense of satisfaction to each and every one of us.
