Creating a Market for Technology through Film: Diegetic Prototypes in the Iron Man Trilogy

Fiction presents a version of reality that can affect an audience’s perceptions and beliefs. This effect is amplified in audio-visual media, where the medium helps convince the viewer that what they are watching is real. Scientists consulting on films have used this effect to promote their own agendas, including using what David Kirby has called ‘diegetic prototypes’ – fictional instances of not-yet realized technologies. These operate like a regular prototype, demonstrating the technology’s function, uses, and implications. They can build anticipation for, and acceptance of, emerging technologies, and can even attract funding to construct those technologies in real life. There has, however, been little scholarship to determine what makes an effective diegetic prototype. We used the Iron Man trilogy of science-fiction films to investigate this. Through a survey and focus groups we explored which futuristic technologies viewers remembered from the films, and whether they anticipated and encouraged those technologies’ development. We found that film-making concerns such as a depicted technology’s relationship to the plot or main characters, and its capacity for spectacle, were more important in fixing the prototype in the audience’s mind than the nature of the technology itself. We also found audiences anticipated and encouraged the development of technologies they saw as morally good. We recommend people wanting to use diegetic prototypes design them to have both a significant on-screen presence and to be depicted as being generally benevolent, the upsides outweighing the downsides.