Designing believable future fiction narratives can be a catalyst to provoke discussion and debate with institutional and public audiences and a powerful means of educating critical and reflective designers that question the ethics of what and why we create.

This paper describes a particular model for design fiction, a guerrilla future, that draws context from a case study, a project-based collaborative studio that brought together 16, third-year students from industrial design, interior design, and visual communications. The objective is to suggest a framework that can be replicated with an undergraduate design studio and enacted with a student, public or corporate audience. The resulting discussion and debate surrounding these emerging, potentially transformative technologies, is intended to foster three concepts among designers and larger audiences. 1. An anticipatory mindset. 2. An awareness of how incremental “seemingly benign” advancements in technology can lead to massive shifts in social behavior. 3. The realization that “successful design” can initiate complex systems, unintended consequences, and unforeseen circumstances which are sometimes more harmful than the ramifications of design failures. Finally, the framework describes a specified type of class and protocol and the results that emerged. A discussion of possible variants to this approach will follow at the end.