Chapter 6. Installation as a form

To be understood, I have to shape my idea into form using the approach of the chosen method. Considering that for design fiction two things are the most important – a design artifact and a world which it is built around – the perfect form for my art project Planet B is an installation.

The term installation art usually means a three-dimensional, large-scale, and mixed-media construction. This art form emerged from the ‘environment’, another artistic genre created by Allan Kaprow in 1958, which represents largescale artworks transforming an interior space.47 One of the features of an installation, as well as an environment, is to intensify the experience of the audience by making the work walk-in, walk-through, but not walk-by. The possibility to interact with the environment helps the viewer to sink into the new reality and sense it deeper than through another art-form. What also makes the genre of installation art special is that, unlike a series of artworks, it creates a strong unified experience. Pieces of it are inseparable and tell one single story to the audience, that is why they should be perceived together.

One of the inspiration sources for my project were total installations of Ilya Kabakov, a Soviet-American conceptual artist, such as Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future and The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment. The author insisted that “the main actor in the total installation, the main center toward which everything is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer.” 47 Here I see a similarity to design fiction. A fictional world in which the diegetic prototype or design artifact exists, has to be explored like an installation. Users should be the main focus of design fiction and active participators of the process because it is a human-centered design practice.46

The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, 1985.

By Ilya Kabakov.

Model and the installation Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future, 2001.

Source kabakov.net

But actually design fiction and installation art have many more things in common. (Look at the scheme on p.63). If we project the idea of design fiction – the bond between a design artifact and the world around it – onto an installation, an installation itself could be understood as a space, environment, that contains the artifact. Here I also noticed a similar parallel between installation art, design fiction, and another design practice: filmmaking. To compose a narrative around a design artifact in the form of an installation we could use the experience of set and prop designers.

The importance of using a prop design for telling stories is undeniable. A welldesigned prop has the ability to not only enhance the texture of the scene but also to add up to the storytelling.48 And that is not all: meaningfully set “environments can have a metaphysical impact on how the audience perceives the story and the characters.” 49

(See the table "Similarities between design fiction, installation art and filmmaking" at page 63.)

In my opinion, an installation is exactly this sort of frozen movie scene. And different kinds of props are used to fill this set. There is a prop classification widely used in production: non practical props, practical props, personal props, hand props, and hero props.50 A hero prop is a prop that gets a significant amount of screen-time. It is the main focal point in the scene. For example, a letter from Hogwarts is a hero prop too. I would say that a design artifact is the design fiction equivalent of a hero prop in film production. The diegetic prototype in design fiction offers the viewers the main topic of discussion. Its role is to raise questions, provoke the exploration of a new reality and of “new kinds of social interaction rituals.” 51

In practice, when starting to work on a new movie, prop designers closely read the script and make a list of all the properties needed for storytelling. To imitate this process without a real script, I wrote down all the facts and feelings connected to the world and the design artifact that I want to mention. Therefore, every prop I created was communicating one or more of them. Thus, all the objects composing the installation were united with a single overall story, the main goal of which is to imagine what kind of world will await us in 30 years.

To learn how I can make my installation more powerful, I read some advice from Annie Atkins, a famous prop designer who worked on well-known movies and series such as Joker, Bridge of Spies, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and others. Specifically, she worked on graphic props. That is why Atkins’s experience is even more useful to me as a graphic designer. For this reason, I will describe below an advice of her, which I found the most suitable for the installation.

Still from The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014. Directed by Wes Anderson. Prop design by Annie Atkins.

“Just because the camera does not see it, does not mean it’s not there” 52

This advice is extremely valuable for filmmakers. Even if the prop does not get a close-up shot, it is still important to have it. It will make the lives of actors easier: when they are working on a set that seems real, it is definitely way more exciting to perform. Which is also the case for an installation in which the main role is played by the viewer. In an installation the “camera” sees everything.

“Sometimes the props do the storytelling” 52

The main focus of any movie or series are the actors. What they say and how they look like seems the most meaningful for the story. That is why, sadly, a lot of work done for films as stage design and prop design stays unnoticed by viewers. Sets and props are created to be an invisible believable background. They become a focal point only when a plot twist depends on them. But sometimes props do a parallel storytelling.

Of course, characters and lines in Harry Potter films are important, and they literally tell us about the magical nature of the world created on set. But if we take a closer look at the graphic props, we will be fascinated by how lively and informative the designs and their contents are. A good example of this is the ticket to Hogwarts express, which says that the departure platform is Platform 9¾. This number says a lot even before the main character does. Everyone knows there is no such platform at any station, and no one would know how to get to it if there was one. I think this great prop design work was one of the reasons why the Harry Potter franchise became beyond popular and made money on selling copies of these props as well.

For the installation it is actually crucial that props do the main storytelling. There is no accidental piece in it to make the narrative clear.

Still from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 2001. Directed by Chris Columbus. Ticket design by MinaLima.

“What’s historically accurate is not always believable” 52

Modern people would not believe in everything that was true two centuries ago. This is not only because the state of science and technology back then was drastically different, but also because now we have some visual expectations towards historical objects.

We might not think about it, but the first phone numbers were much shorter than the ones we know today. That is why for a graphic prop designer it is important to analyze whether the viewer would recognize this shorter line of digits as a phone number, especially if the formatting is different. So, sometimes, designs produced for films, are not historically accurate but believable in today’s context.

Another example is banknote design. Now it is hard to imagine but most of the non-modern banknotes were printed only on one side.52 But if this historical accuracy would take place on set, for most of the viewers these banknotes will seem unfinished and unnatural.

There are also some stereotypes about how historical objects should look like coming from museums. If we look at an old piece of paper in a museum or archive, we will notice that it aged and became yellowish. That does not mean that the paper was that yellow when it was just produced. But if modern people will see a snowwhite sheet of paper in a historical movie they would not believe the image, because it would seem like it was just printed with a regular office copier.

To avoid these situations, when viewers do not believe in something historically correct, designers always have to decide how accurate they should be on every single occasion. The same is correct for designing futuristic environments. There is always a risk that a believable gadget (e.g. device based on a completely new technology not widely spread in present days yet) would draw the whole attention to the form rather than content and idea behind it. In this case, a “narrative that focuses too much on the technological gadgetry quickly loses its critical value by no longer providing the provocations that design fiction can offer.” 45

Summing up the chapter, I would like to mention again that an installation is a great form of displaying projects of design fiction which could help to experience the narrative. But it also comes with some difficulties, as does every project about the future. So, in the next chapter, I will elaborate on these issues and will discuss what it means to design for the future.