Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

As Fredric Jameson famously remarked, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism. Yet alternatives are exactly what we need. We need to dream new dreams for the twenty-first century as those of the twentieth century rapidly fade. But what role can design play? When people think of design, most believe it is about problem solving. Even the more expressive forms of design are about solving aesthetic problems. Faced with huge challenges such as overpopulation, water shortages, and climate change, designers feel an overpowering urge to work together to fix them, as though they can be broken down, quantified, and solved. Design’s inherent optimism leaves no alternative but it is becoming clear that many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour. Although essential most of the time, design’s inbuilt optimism can greatly complicate things, first, as a form of denial that the problems we face are more serious than they appear, and second, by channeling energy and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there. Rather than giving up altogether, though, there are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could be—speculative design. This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.

Keywords: alternatives, dream a new dream, design as problem solving, design as a way to speculate how things could be, new perspectives, alternative ways, design speculations as a catalyst

Four different dimension of speculative design:

Probable

Plausible

Possible

Preferable

Designing for how things could be, conceptual design: “Patrick Stevenson Keating’s The Quantum Parallelograph (2011) is a public engagement prop exploring ideas about quantum physics and multiverses by finding and printing out online information from a user’s “parallel life.” It uses abstraction along with generic technical references to suggest a strange technological device. It is clearly a prop but it sets to work on the imagination very quickly.”

The first conceptual artist, Marchel Duchamp, highlights core features of a conceptual work:

10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind.

17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.

28. once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.

31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.

9.The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.

Conceptual design as a form of critique:

n. The term critical design coined in the mid nineties at Computer Related Design Research Studio at the Royal College of Art

d. “critical design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life.”

Critical design =/ Affirmative design

testimonials of what could be offering alternatives that highlight weaknesses within existing normality involves critical thinking, being skeptical, all good critical design offers an alternative