A School for Design Fiction
James Langdon/GfZK Leipzig/Franciska Zólyom

»A school for design fiction« was convened on 8 November, 2013 at Gallery for Contemporary Art, Leipzig. This itinerant school employs the curious genre of ‘design fiction’ to assert storytelling as the primary function of design, assuming that every artefact has the potential to express the character of the culture that produced it. This publication documents and expands on the founding of the school through a series of imagined scenarios. These include a drama at the printer for architect Augustus Pugin in 1836, the history of the universe as observed on an English hillside in 1937, the first human trial of split brain surgery in California in 1961, and a Scottish speech synthesis studio in 2013.