Too Much Truth: David Kirby

As part of the Walker’s presentation of Designs for Different Futures (on view now), we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019), exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

This conversation took place by Skype on December 14, 2018, with David Kirby at home in Manchester, England, and exhibition co-curator Emmet Byrne at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Emmet Byrne

In your book Lab Coats in Hollywood [2011], you investigate the relationship between Hollywood film, the scientific community, and the public’s perception of scientific fact. You write that both scientists and filmmakers are trying to reveal truths via their particular disciplines. Since you wrote your book eight years ago, our shared landscape has shifted to a point where it feels like every aspect of truth is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Science is under attack. Our consensus reality varies from day to day. How do you see this affecting the scientific community and Hollywood?

David Kirby

Currently in my research I am addressing how scientists can use narrative as a way to break through the post-truth world. My field, science communication studies, tries to understand the ways that scientists communicate with the public. A foundation of current science communication studies is what we call the deficit model. The deficit model is a belief, usually held by scientists, that attributes negative attitudes toward science and technology to the public’s lack of information. Under this belief, the way to change people’s minds, to persuade them, is to throw facts at them until they come to the conclusion that scientists want them to come to. We have known for a long time that the deficit model does not work. Facts on their own are not as persuasive as we once thought. It also turns out that sometimes the more knowledge people have about issues like climate change and genetic engineering, the less they are willing to engage with these issues. I argue that narratives could help provide the public with another tool for making choices. Narratives can be very useful in setting out the context for a scientific issue, establishing the stakes involved, providing information, and offering potential solutions.

EB

And this is why you have been studying Hollywood films.

DK

Yes. Why do scientists become involved in these fictional endeavors, especially when these depictions are ultimately in the hands of other people? The filmmaker, whether it be the director or the special-effects technician or the set designer or whoever, ultimately controls these depictions. So why would scientists get involved? They get involved because movies can disseminate their science or their technology to the larger world and reach millions of people.

Not only that, but film naturalizes scientific images and events within fictionalized worlds. Movies make it seem as if this is the state of the world, because it’s the state of the world in that fictional space. If it’s done well enough, people can suspend their disbelief. This means that movies can have an influence over audiences’ perceptions of science by legitimizing and contextualizing scientific depictions. For this reason, some scientists try to get their controversial scientific ideas into films. The case of Jurassic Park [1993] is a prime example. Several scientists, including the paleontologist Jack Horner, used the film as a way to convey the notion, controversial at the time, that birds are related to dinosaurs—that birds evolved from dinosaurs, not some other lineage of reptiles.

Another reason scientists work on popular films is to convince the public that a scientific topic needs more political, financial, or scientific attention. The films function like the Ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. They present audiences with a bleak vision of the future, making it seem real and possible while also telling the audience, “This is one possibility. If you change your ways this will not come to pass.” Examples of this would be movies depicting environmental catastrophes, like San Andreas [2015] or The Day after Tomorrow [2004] or Twister [1996]. 

The third reason scientists work on films is to create depictions of future technologies that stimulate desire in audiences for these potential technologies to become realities. I refer to these depictions as diegetic prototypes, and they encourage public support by establishing the need for, harmlessness, and viability of these technologies. Diegetic prototypes exist in these fictional worlds as real objects that people actually use and interact with, giving them a social context. Diegetic prototypes are in essence what I term pre-product placements. Just as with a real product placement, the goal of a pre-product placement is to instill a desire in the audience for these products, but the only way for audiences to get these pre-products is to support their development.

In many ways, the technology in Minority Report [2002] is the überexample of a diegetic prototype. The filmmakers brought on board a scientist named John Underkoffler to design the gestural interface technology that Tom Cruise’s character uses when he moves around text and images on a computer screen with just his hands. Underkoffler had worked a bit on this technology in the MIT Media Lab before the movie. But he saw this as a great opportunity to promote the gestural interface to a wider public. So he spent a lot of time treating that diegetic prototype, that fictional technology, as if he were developing a real-world technology. He established rules for how Tom Cruise had to move his hands. He used a lot of different languages, gestural languages like American Sign Language and semaphore, to really work out the rigid rules for this interface. He also convinced Steven Spielberg to include a flaw in the movie: Tom Cruise goes to shake a character’s hand, and when he does that, everything on the computer screen gets thrown into the corner. Why would he include a flaw? Well, because real-world technologies always have flaws. It made it look even more real that something like that would happen. 

It also addressed one real-world critique of gestural interface technologies. According to Underkoffler, people had not been willing to put money toward a gestural interface because they felt that it had certain design offlaws that would keep it from working properly. One of the criticisms was that it wouldn’t be sensitive enough to actually follow hand movements, so by including the flaw, he’s essentially saying, “Ah, look. It’s too sensitive. So sensitive that he dragged all of his data into the corner.”

When people watched the movie, they said, “Wow, what a great technology. It could work, and wouldn’t it be good to have that?” Underkoffler was able to gain the financing he needed to create a real-world prototype, and then he used that to get contracts for people to actually buy and use the thing. 

EB

When you see the technology in such a fully realized world, it seems inevitable that it will come to exist. This reminds me of something you mentioned in your book, which is the danger of how easily film can naturalize an idea. It’s the flipside of its narrative power: it takes an opinion, puts it on-screen, and presents it in a linear experience that can often discourage disagreement.

DK

One of the potential pitfalls of using narrative for science communication is that it’s easy to fall into the deficit-model trap of using narrative only as a way to manage public opinion. There is a danger with narrative that you are removing the public’s agency and coercing them toward a preferred position rather than fostering their ability to come to their own conclusions. Using narrative to push the public to one position is just manipulation. When we talk about using narrative, we need to talk about using it ethically—trying not to use it to remove the public from the conversation.

EB

This brings me to the speculative films that some designers and architects create. The projects I’m thinking of are more interested in asking questions about the future of a certain technology, using ambiguity as a strategy for opening conversation and critique. They seem to be an inverted use of a diegetic prototype. Instead of placing a desired technology in a fictional world in order to naturalize it, they are asking the viewer to extrapolate a fictional world out of a speculative object. Julian Bleecker elegantly made this connection between diegetic prototypes and speculative design in his essay “Design Fiction.”^{Julian Bleecker, “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction,” published March 2009 by Near Future Laboratory, drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/writing/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf.}

DK

The way I conceived of the diegetic prototype was as this notion of instilling desire in people to want something to become a reality. But certainly, people like Julian took that idea and said, “That’s one aspect, but how might this technology actually be used in the future? How might users use it in multiple ways, in ways we couldn’t imagine?” Design fiction is built on diegetic prototypes, but he’s taking it a step further.

EB

In terms of how scientists will continue to get their messages out into the world through narrative—are there other media, like YouTube or social media, that you think might rise to the level of film at some point?

DK

Film has an advantage in that it’s a major event. A new Marvel film like Black Panther [2018] comes out and people want to talk about its technology. But the ways in which the diegetic prototype functions can be done through any medium. Any medium can serve as a virtual witnessing technology. YouTube, certainly. A lot of scientists are now making their own short films as a way to contextualize their research or technologies that they want to see come to pass. And things like Twitter can be used for storytelling. Other media can serve the function, but they don’t necessarily get the associated media coverage and public attention that a major Hollywood film would.

EB

Last question! Could a diegetic prototype exist in real life, outside of film and fictional media?

DK

This makes me think about our current media echo chambers and how they create their own reality in many ways. President Trump’s wall is a kind of diegetic prototype within that echo chamber. It exists because he says it exists.

EB

It’s obviously a symbolic project—and you could also argue that the wall in fact already exists, as he and others have been quoted as saying, to add to the confusion.^{See Derek Robertson, “Trump’s Metaphysical Wall: An Investigation,” Politico, January 8, 2019, www.politico.com.} The border security already exists. The fear of immigrants already exists. The racism already exists. The detention centers already exist.

DK

And he’s also still trying to convince us that it has to be built. So it’s at once real in the echo chamber but also not real outside the echo chamber or even sometimes within the echo chamber. So instead of Schrödinger’s cat in a box, it’s a wall, and it both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. ▪︎    

DAVID KIRBY is chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies in Liberal Arts department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Previously he was professor of science communication studies at the University of Manchester, England, and program director of the MSc in science communication. He has a PhD in evolutionary genetics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the author of Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (2011).

EMMET BYRNE is the design director and associate curator of design at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He provides creative leadership for the Walker in all areas of visual communication, branding, and publishing, while overseeing the award-winning in-house design studio. He is the editor of the Gradient and is the creator of the Walker’s Intangibles platform.

The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago