Design fiction uses provocation as a central tool: showing plausible but uncomfortable futures to force reflection. But not all provocations are equal. The distinction between productive provocation and spectacle can make the difference between work that opens possibilities and work that closes into anxiety or indifference.
Productive provocation asks: "Do we want this future? If not, what do we do to avoid it or build a better one?". It opens spaces for imagination and action. Spectacle — dystopia for the pleasure of fear, aesthetic installation without exit, "Black Mirror" without a question — leaves anxiety or passive entertainment. The implicit message is often "technology is terrible and we can't do anything about it" or "look at that unsettling future!" without invitation to change.
A central ethical question: who presents whose futures? When a climate famine scenario is shown in a Manhattan art museum to an audience unfamiliar with food insecurity, we risk "trauma tourism" — consuming others' suffering as aesthetic experience. When the same scenario is co-designed with a community already living food tensions, the conversation changes: we do not observe, we participate.
Who is represented also matters. A future about surveillance designed only by white Western designers may invisibilise those already living under control. A future about gentrification presented by a real estate agency has different interests from one co-created with tenants in struggle. Civic design fiction requires attention to power dynamics: who has voice, who is silenced, who benefits from the output.
Tools for ethical provocation: co-design with affected communities, structured debriefs after intense exercises, space for emotions and dissent, clarity on goals and next steps. The Ethical OS toolkit (Institute for the Future and Omidyar Network) offers useful questions: who might be harmed? Who is not represented? What assumptions are we taking for granted?
At Relatronica, we believe in constructive provocation: scenarios that disturb the comfort of inevitability, but that open spaces for imagination and action. We do not design dystopias for the pleasure of fear — we design alternatives for the courage of hope. Every lab we facilitate includes an explicit question: "What do we do now?".