In his doctoral research, the organizer developed a Creative Writing Assistance system using machine learning and natural language processing. This system was inspired by the “Himitsu-dogu （ひみつ道具, secret items）” in “Doraemon.” Based on this experience, he thought that coming up with fiction-based research ideas might help students who are struggling with how to develop their existing research ideas or who are unable to come up with research ideas in the first place, so he organized this workshop on how to come up with fiction-based research ideas. In addition, following the characteristics of the GCL, the organizer aims to have participants co-create research ideas through discussions among diverse students with different specialties.
In this WS, the participants did group work on practicing how to develop research ideas by referring to science fiction works, using a method called “SF prototyping” as a reference. The organizer and participants introduced their favorite fictional works to each other at first. Then participants were asked to form a group to do group work to discuss their “research idea” inspired by a fictional story. After selecting a fictional work as a reference, they considered “visions that have not yet been realized” and developed their “research idea” for realizing them. The output of a group, “a research idea,” was summarized as slides.
The purpose of this WS was to discuss and practice the method of “co-creation of a research idea based on a fiction,” referring to the technique of “SF prototyping.” The organizer introduced the idea of “SF prototyping” referring to a recently published book 『SFプロトタイピング』 (宮本道人ら, 2021, 早川書房). This book introduces a case study of SF prototyping in business. In such cases, “outputting SF story through workshops” are mainly focused rather than “referring to existing fiction to come up with an idea.” In this WS, while referring to this book to introduce the idea of SF prototyping, the organizer did not set outputting SF as a goal. It is because the WS’s main purpose was “sharing the way of thinking a research idea based on a fiction.”
Three students, each with different expertise, participated in the workshop. They used the near-future science fiction anime “PSYCHO-PASS” (2012) as the source of their research idea. Inspired an avatar unit system in the animation, they discussed and come up with the idea: “In a society where loneliness and mental health are becoming more and more important issues, we need a ‘nosy’ interactive agent that can check on the user’s mental health without the user having to take active action.” There was a participant in the group who had expertise in mental health care, and the organizer felt that the group work was conducted in a way that made good use of the expertise of the participants.
To prevent infection with the COVID-19 infection, this WS was held online.
It is hoped that the research idea discussed in this workshop will lead to actual research plans in the future and that they will become collaborative projects among students across disciplines.