Design notes on a lonely drone

Abstract

Design fictions present us with spaces for construction and reflection, potentially mixing various modes of the emergent and the speculative with the shaping and communication of near future imaginaries. In this article we adopt a blend of rhetorical devices to present and discuss design fictions. We do this by referring to current discourses around drone technologies. We resituate these in the context of the networked city and the projection of a hybrid rogue drone. She is dissatisfied with her given functions and begins to question her deployment in urban policing. The article is based in the conceptual end of designing such a future city space. It refers to practical, popular and academic materials and citations to argue for the need for openness and clarity at the ideational end of developing design fictions. The text is part of a wider developmental and reflexive design–research process that takes up the speculative in design fictions and related hermeneutic design research.