Politique-Fiction

Politique-Fiction is a self-funded, cross-partisan project initiated by our studio and Max Mollon (Laboratoire des Déviations Écologiques), with the collaboration of the Design Fiction Club and La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris).

The first season speculated on the potential impact of the political programmes of five of the main candidates in the April 2017 presidential election, before the first round.

Through several phases of workshops and debates, this inaugural edition of Politique-Fiction allowed voters to project themselves into the France of tomorrow, focusing on the key issues of the presidential campaign. The approach centred on the major themes of the main election: governance, transparency, education, economic, and cultural policies. These different angles were explored through the lens of the “future of work”, which was at the heart of the candidates’ programmes.

For each candidate, two design fiction scenarios were imagined, extrapolated from the candidates’ actual proposals: one near-utopian fiction (“What would happen if everything went as promised in the political programme?”), and a second, more critical one (“What if the implementation of this programme led to unforeseen side effects?”), exploring the grey areas of the programme. The scenarios and their design fictions were presented as fictional newspaper articles from a more or less near future, offering a glimpse of how the French might experience these political transformations. To envision this, the scenarios considered how different profiles of citizens would interact with the new products and services resulting from these political measures.