Someone Else’s Problem Field

The paper, titled Implications for Adoption, discusses how technology researchers tend to regard integration of the technologies they research into everyday life as someone else’s problem. Whilst there are a large variety of strategies to try and understand the future of technological adoption, which in this work are mapped onto Gartner’s hype cycle (see below), Imagination researchers Joseph Lindley and Paul Coulton argue that the effects of these “someone else’s problem field” (a term borrowed from Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) can be mitigated by integrating design fiction into research projects.