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Designing for dystopia: software engineering research for the post-apocalypse

Published: 01 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present.

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cover image ACM Conferences
FSE 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
November 2016
1156 pages
ISBN:9781450342186
DOI:10.1145/2950290
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Published: 01 November 2016

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Author Tags

  1. culture
  2. design fiction
  3. dystopia
  4. ideation
  5. post-apocalypse
  6. software engineering

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