No one in the AB23 memory lab woke up one Saturday morning.

Maplespring takes place in the year 2059 in an enclosed arcology in Northern Ontario where memory labs are used to induce hibernation-like states. Some of the themes covered in the story include sleep therapy, arcologies, bio-engineering, superorganisms and connectionism.

In this exercise I reach out to writers and asked them to write a short story based on a simple brief, containing a time horizon, themes and a few details I’d like covered.

Once the story is written, I extract diegetic prototypes from it and turn them into Design Fiction ideas in the form of mock ads that are scattered throughout the book as if they were evidence of that fictional world.