Design Prospects: Investigating Design Fiction via a Rogue Urban Drone

Design fiction is garnering attention as a mode of inquiry on the prospective in design practice and inquiry. This paper addresses design fiction as a potential area for design research to explore communicatively. The paper does so through a performative essayistic research text. Presented are extracts from an online visual-verbal hypernarrative and expository research writing. The performative exploration includes views from the persona of a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone policing a near future city. Her perspectives are prospective. However, the urban ‘drone-gone-rogue’ is crafted as a design fictional rhetorical device to comment on topical issues in the here-and-now. Her views are located in relation to the matter of voice in design fiction. The drone asserts that cultural critique is needed from within design practice and research; she maintains that design fiction is one means to conveying it in contrast to the prevailing regimes of surveillance and promotional discourses of the ‘smart city’.