Diagrams of Uncertainty or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Visual Rhetoric
Authors: 
Luke Sellers, Mark BlytheAuthors Info & Claims
Luke Sellers, Mark BlytheAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 111 - 115
Abstract
Design is concerned with uncertain futures. There are a number of methodologies and toolkits for thinking about future possibilities and ways of dealing with uncertainty. Many of these approaches adapt diagrams that were developed in the nineteen fifties by military strategists and futurologists. This provocation critiques the scientistic rhetoric of such diagrams and explores alternate representations of uncertainty, drawing on absurdist art to present a more undisciplined and messier but possibly more realistic representation of uncertainty.
References
[1]
Emanuele Arielli. 2021. The Anxieties of Control and the Aesthetics of Failure. Studi di Estetica 19, 1 (2021). https://philarchive.org/rec/ARITAO-5
[2]
Shaowen Bardzell. 2011. Towards a Feminist HCI Methodology: Social Science, Feminism, and HCI. Interactions 24, 3 (2011), 12–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3068259
[3]
Mark Blythe and Enrique Encinas. 2018. Research Fiction and Thought Experiments in Design. Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction 12, 1 (May 2018), 1–105. https://doi.org/10.1561/1100000070 Publisher: Now Publishers, Inc.
[4]
John M. Carroll (Ed.). 1995. Scenario-based design: envisioning work and technology in system development. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., USA.
[5]
Alan Cooper. 1999. The Inmates are Running the Asylum. In Software-Ergonomie ’99: Design von Informationswelten, Udo Arend, Edmund Eberleh, and Knut Pitschke (Eds.). Vieweg+Teubner Verlag, Wiesbaden, 17–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-99786-9_1
[6]
Paul Coulton and Joseph Lindley. 2017. Vapourworlds and Design Fiction: The Role of Intentionality.
[7]
K. Coyle. 1996. Mary in the Christian Tradition: From a Contemporary Perspective. Gracewing. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eKWGPwAACAAJ
[8]
Nigel Cross. 2001. Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline Versus Design Science. Design Issues 17, 3 (July 2001), 49–55. https://doi.org/10.1162/074793601750357196
[9]
Anthony Dunne. 2005. Hertzian tales: electronic products, aesthetic experience, and critical design (2005 ed. ed.). MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. OCLC: ocm61115612.
[10]
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts London.
[11]
Abigail C. Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace, and Joyce S. R. Yee. 2017. Research Through Design: Twenty-First Century Makers and Materialities. Design Issues 33, 3 (July 2017), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00447
[12]
Nathan Holbert, Michael Dando, and Isabel Correa. 2020. Afrofuturism as critical constructionist design: building futures from the past and present. Learning, Media and Technology 45 (April 2020), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1754237
[13]
Noura Howell, Audrey Desjardins, and Sarah Fox. 2021. Cracks in the Success Narrative: Rethinking Failure in Design Research through a Retrospective Trioethnography. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 28, 6 (Dec. 2021), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3462447
[14]
Noura Howell, Britta F. Schulte, Amy Twigger Holroyd, Rocío Fatás Arana, Sumita Sharma, and Grace Eden. 2021. Calling for a Plurality of Perspectives on Design Futuring: An Un-Manifesto. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI EA ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3450364 event-place:, Yokohama, Japan,.
[15]
H. Kahn, A.J. Wiener, and Hudson Institute. 1967. The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-three Years. Macmillan. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VJotAAAAMAAJ
[16]
L Keidan. 2008. Bodily_Functions_In_Performance_SRG.pdf. https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/uploads/documents/Bodily_Functions_In_Performance_SRG.pdf
[17]
Charles Maland. 1979. Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus. American Quarterly 31, 5 (1979), 697–717. https://doi.org/10.2307/2712432 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press.
[18]
Institute of Risk Management. 2018. Horizon Scanning: A Practitioner’s Guide. https://www.theirm.org/media/7340/horizon-scanning_final2.pdf
[19]
James Pierce. 2021. In Tension with Progression: Grasping the Frictional Tendencies of Speculative, Critical, and other Alternative Designs. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445406 event-place:, Yokohama, Japan,.
[20]
P. Schimmel, K. Stiles, and Calif.) Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles. 1998. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979. Museum of Contemporary Art. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JQs8DQEACAAJ
[21]
R. Sutherland. 2019. The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense. Ebury Publishing. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JP0ajgEACAAJ
[22]
Charles Taylor. 1988. Alternative World Scenarios for Strategic Planning. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:107484828
[23]
Jasper Tran O’Leary, Sara Zewde, Jennifer Mankoff, and Daniela K. Rosner. 2019. Who Gets to Future? Race, Representation, and Design Methods in Africatown. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300791 event-place: Glasgow, Scotland Uk.
[24]
Gov UK. 2017. The Futures Toolkit: Tools for Futures Thinking and Foresight across UK Government. (2017).
[25]
Gov UK. 2021. A_Brief_Guide_to_Futures_Thinking_and_Foresight_-_2022.pdf. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/635931b18fa8f557d066c1b1/A_Brief_Guide_to_Futures_Thinking_and_Foresight_-_2022.pdf
[26]
Gov UK. 2022. UK NSC: horizon scanning. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-nsc-approach-to-horizon-scanning/uk-nsc-horizon-scanning
[27]
T. Warr. 2006. The Artist’s Body. Phaidon Press. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tt4RPwAACAAJ
[28]
Yosuke Ushigome. 2020. Having many rounds of conversations recently confirming the validity of the Many Worlds Future Cone from our previous research https://t.co/8KDOTG4Xlc. https://twitter.com/ushi_/status/1334494675844149250
[29]
Slavoj Zizek. 2011. Living in the end times. (2011). Publisher: Verso.
Index Terms
- Diagrams of Uncertainty or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Visual Rhetoric
Recommendations
Dealing with Uncertainty: A Survey of Theories and Practices
Uncertainty accompanies our life processes and covers almost all fields of scientific studies. Two general categories of uncertainty, namely, aleatory uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty, exist in the world. While aleatory uncertainty refers to the ...
Enhancing Visual Encodings of Uncertainty Through Aesthetic Depictions in Line Graph Visualisations
Human Interface and the Management of InformationAbstractThe method of representing uncertainty can drastically influence a user’s interpretation of the visualised data. Whilst reasons for the scarce adoption of accepting uncertainty visualisations has been extensively researched, exploring further ...
The Eight Continent: Design for an Intentional Surprise
CW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on CyberworldsIn this paper I will present and discuss the design thinking, methods, processes and some examples of work, that demonstrates how I together with different co-creators set up a work practice, using digital 3d objects and images. That in different ways ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
July 2024
501 pages
ISBN:9798400706325
DOI:10.1145/3656156
Copyright © 2024 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 01 July 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
DIS '24
Sponsor:
DIS '24: Designing Interactive Systems Conference
July 1 - 5, 2024
IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 86Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)86
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6
Reflects downloads up to 15 Jan 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format