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An astute observer, Perec found inspiration in situations, gestures and habits that we often overlook or miss. Using the prefix “infra-”, he highlighted the importance of what is underneath or hidden and which could be uncovered as an interrogation of the quotidian. How would the architecture of homes change when families become more multi-generational? What are the financial implications of age, if retirement is still marked at age 60?
THE BASICS YOU NEED TO KNOW & UNDERSTAND ABOUT SPECULATIVE DESIGN
Not if you consider the fact that the WIPP will remain dangerous to human lives for 10,000 years. That’s the issue designers and scientists are grappling with as they figure out how to handle the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico—the United State’s only underground radioactive waste repository. Outside of fighting Klingons and going where no man had gone before, the show was chock-full of ideas and concepts that have had a deep influence on tech designs today.
CONSIDERING RACE AND TECHNOLOGY
Speculative design perspective can be used by companies and designers from other fields as a critical thinking tool to examine problems from a different viewpoint and switch from tactical thinking to a strategic mindset. Copenhagen-based architecture studio BIG, instead, designed a solution where people can live sustainably in cities floating on the ocean. As coastal cities struggle to cope with rapid population growth, many simply pour sand into the ocean to create new land, destroying millions of hectares of the ocean and marine life. Furhermore, the rising sea levels and climate change are compounding the problem. Neo_Fruits is a Speculative Technological Design Project, by Industrial Designer Meydan Levy, that explores a future scenario where humans will create food artificially. In this project, artificial fruits are designed and printed in 4 dimensions, to offer a nutritious and vitamin-rich alternative to familiar fruits.
Review: In ‘Unsung Hero,’ a family’s musical success story comes to life via the clan itself
Womack lifts up musician and physicist Stephon Alexander's TED talk about how jazz legend John Coltrane's song “Giant Steps” was an aural and physical diagram of Einstein's Theory of Relativity [93]. The power of music is amplified in Afrofuturist offerings and the stories behind and within these offerings can open and inform design speculation imaginations. Speculative design encourages us to push the boundaries of creativity by moving away from conventional assumptions and safe thinking. This shift of perspective and constant wondering of “what if” can refresh the design process. You can also diversify your perspective and collaborate with experts from various fields, such as science, sociology, economics, and psychology. Their insights can enrich the process by providing different lenses through which to view alternative futures.
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If a particular feature or design solution is too far removed from reality, it will be incredibly hard to create and implement. For example, if you’re designing a hotel room in the year 2030, you can’t design it to be some futuristic space that uses no technology that exists in the present day. You have to imagine what the room would look like if we were able to create an entirely new hotel experience without any limitations. Regarding digital technologies more specifically, such endeavor is important because it helps to show how the use of such devices is a joint construction between designers and users. Some of the gestures we describe here indeed emerged from people’s everyday practices, either from a naïve perspective (lifting up one’s finger in a cell phone conversation to have better signal) or because they’re simply more practical (watching a movie in bed with the laptop shifted).
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Many tools that practitioners and educators use for Speculative Design come in the form of lists of items that facilitate building and exploring future scenarios. For example by describing the forms in which Design Fictions can be created, or by providing lists of probable future predictions that enable designers to have a sense of what may happen in the future. Speculative design encourages product designers to transition from a purely tactical approach to a more strategic one.
This aesthetic is often used in conjunction with others to create a overall feeling of unease or tension, as it gives the impression that something is not quite right or that things are not as they should be. The goal of speculative design is not to provide definite answers, but to generate questions and provoke thought. It is a tool for critical thinking that can be used by individuals, organizations, and society as a whole. The questions we asked and the possible implications we arrived at on the project, should be relevant to anyone who is interested in envisioning the future. These are starting points, first questions on how technology could be domesticated, repurposed, recycled in interesting ways outside normative technological discourse.
Speculative Design Process
It's not hard to imagine a demo of a popular chatbot like ChatGPT (because you know there's no way Apple's putting Google Gemini up on stage) running locally on an M4 MacBook, with an emphasis on how that can afford you increased privacy and security. In this same world, we are bombarded by comparisons to people with higher and lower social ratings, the concept of privacy ceases to exist when everybody knows us by name, and gaps in economic inequality becomes magnified. In an episode titled Nose Dive (2016), we are introduced to a world where every interaction we have with others is rated by them on a 5-star scale review, where our average rating affects our socioeconomic status and our access to public and private services. There are multiple online tools that can be used to create 3D objects, narratives, maps, communication and more. If we look at all the word clouds, and compare the results, it is possible to describe the principal focuses of the different “families” of Speculative Design practitioners, or, at least, their focuses on how they express them in their interviews, i.e. the way in which they represent themselves in public communication.
The mission of speculative design is to enact change for a preferable future rather than conforming to the status quo. The key changes in the economic and design world have drastically limited the ability of designers as a whole to take part in speculative design. These possible futures are lenses used to better understand the present, and what we want and don’t want to see in our future as a society.
Therefore, critical thinking is an essential aspect of speculative design.[14] Critiquing norms, values and why we design is what motivates speculative designers. Like the pioneers of Speculative Design, many first-wave practitioners today are shifting priorities from futures to realities. (J. Paul Neeley’s thoughts on expanding Dunne & Raby’s a/b list are a good example.) They increasingly seek to go beyond “sparking discussions” to embracing action, through projects that address urgent issues such as climate change, migration, and social justice. Rather than simply speculating on emerging technologies, these designers consider what aspects of their speculations can be transformed into actions in the present. New perspectives are also being opened up by practitioners working outside as well as inside the established boundaries of Speculative Design, drawing on certain elements and blending them with aspects of other approaches. Since speculative design continuously interacts with other related practices, fields and disciplines, it uses any methodology that is accessible and appropriate at any given moment.
Though not formally defined in any known publication, the shaping of this literary canon in the areas of speculative design and futuring have remained pretty homogeneous throughout its history in the HCI and design space. While we have begun to see interrogations of this homogeneity [67], most other works that discuss speculative design from the perspective of Black or brown scholars are considered to focus more on race than on the radical futures and critical reflection that speculative design and futuring promise. This has in turn separated these conversations as not being overlapped, and instead directed the playfulness of considering science fiction as an underpinning of technology to a privileged few. Scholars have commented on the notion of white men dominating both Silicon Valley and science fiction as not being unrelated, and that over-emphasizing popular forms of science fiction in computing might contribute to gatekeeping stereotypes [26]. Traditional approaches to technology design have historically ignored Blackness in both who engages and conceptualizes future technologies. Design contributions of groups marginalized along race and class are often othered, and rarely considered the design standard.
Design is based on the observation and understanding of the world around us, and by practicing it we endeavour to articulate our needs, desires and expectations. The problem arises when we want to expand the horizon of our observation in order to identify emergent themes. The question is how to begin with the design of concepts when we do not know what the design space itself will look like, let alone who its users will be. The approach and practice of speculative design is a particularly stimulative strategy for researching the “space” that lies beyond “current”and the“now”. Even though speculative design is used to create possible futures, we have to remember to make our visualizations realistic.
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