Neuromancer Workshop: Towards Designing Experiential Entanglement with Science Fiction

The use of design fiction to speculate an imaginative and critical future has increasingly been recognized in the design research community. Instead of focusing on speculation with a critical position, this paper reports an experiential approach to entangling everyday experiences in the process of speculating. As science fiction has successfully provided fictional-world-building as entanglement material for speculation, we held a workshop to conduct an entanglement experiment of personal photographs with cyberpunk literature, Neuromancer. We built a card deck consisting of 206 quotes from the novel and invited 15 participants to shuffle, draw, and re-compose sentences that best matched their personal photographs. Purposefully selected everyday anchors and sci-fi features in the quotes allowed us to investigate the moment when an everyday photograph encountered a fictional world. We describe the phenomena of imagination and entanglement, explain experiential entanglement, propose a conceptual model for entangled status, and present interpretations and implications in HCI.