At the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition Designs for Different Futures (2019–2020), curators presented a selection of speculative design projects from around the world. There are many fascinating examples, including Alien Nation: Parade 0 by Portuguese designer and artist Lisa Hartje Moura that explores the use of the word “alien” to mean foreigner or immigrant and suggests these “aliens” make a new home on the moon. A short film complete with costume, props and set design uses tropes that are familiar from science fiction – a reduced colour palette, a robotic voice-over and the concept of space travel itself. But the themes are politics, inclusion and society – this is a project very much informed by our current reality that explores a fictional absurdist alternative in an attempt to disrupt social norms.
At Broken Nature, the Paola Antonelli-curated exhibition at the Triennale Di Milano Museum (2019), there were also a number of fascinating examples of speculative design. One science–art collaboration Resurrecting the Sublime extracted the scent from the flower of three extinct plant species by sequencing the DNA from specimens. Like Alien Nation, this is also an exercise in speculating on a parallel reality – on an alternate planet earth these plants may not have gone extinct, and could have been alive today to give off their perfume. (Read my full review of Broken Nature here).
These examples give a clue, but what is Speculative Design? While design might be seen as problem-solving for a known user in the here and now, Speculative Design envisions solutions for a speculative future or parallel reality at a societal scale. Also sometimes called Critical Design or Design Fictions, it goes beyond the creation of an individual object for use, and into the realms of science fiction and imaginary future worlds.
The term was initially coined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby – British academics currently at The New School in New York and also the leaders of design studio Dunne and Raby. Their projects aim to free the mind from the constraints of our lived reality and open design up to possible realities that question long-held beliefs.
“[Speculative 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.”
Dunne and Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming
Dunne and Raby’s book Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming is a treasure trove of inspiration, including their own projects and projects by others, from Star Trek and Black Mirror to Thomas Thwaites’ The Toaster Project, an attempt to make a toaster using locally-sourced materials that highlights the complexity of the supply chain. His TED talk is a hoot.
Dunne and Raby’s own projects offer a range of different investigations, exploring topics including our living environment, impossible and fictional objects, politics, technology, world-building and food modification. In Not Here, Not Now (Future Fictions exhibition, Z33 Museum, 2014), they envisage a world where Scotland and Wales have separated from England to become United Micro Kingdoms.
From there, they speculate four zones, each of which have a different political system and a different energy system – they are: Communo-Nuclearist (communist and nuclear energy), Anarcho-Darwinist (anarchist evolutionists), Bio-Liberal (biotechnology and liberal) and the Digitarians (combining neo-liberalism and digital technology). The images created for the project are interfaces for the transportation system of the ‘Digitarian’ society, presenting not so much an image of a design, but a image through which to imagine an alternative reality. Read the essay on this project here.
Where Dunne and Raby’s project envisages a number of different political and energy-based realities, the work of Cameron Tonkinwise starts by a philosophical questioning the very nature of history and knowledge. The Sydney-based academic at UTS focuses on Speculative Critical Design, including a questioning of political and social structures, but also the foundations of knowledge, power and economics. Previously a continental philosopher, Tonkinwise questions the basis of our society through philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault.
“I wish I came across more designers with astute critical capacities to read the implicit sexism or racism, etc., of designed images or environments; let alone designers with rich side projects of culture jamming or subculture creating.
“The tendency of much of the first wave of Critical Speculative Design, for example, to adopt the aesthetic of fashion editorial or neo-noir cinema, seemed to me to show a quite ironically uncritical visual politics.”
Cameron Tonkinwise, speculativedesignedu.eu
According to Tonkinwise, designers too often accept existing conditions and instead need to design not just for the positive, but also for the negative – they need to consider the “bad actors” in our societies and systems, from terrorists to trolls to the merely self-interested. He also argues that this approach may introduce solutions to systemic problems in design, including decolonising design and making design more sustainable. He also criticises some speculative design projects in the first wave for merely adopting the aesthetics of “fashion editorial or neo-noir cinema” as a very uncritical visual politics. Read more in an interview with Tonkinwise here.
For Australian designer Lucy McRae, speculative design subverts the masculine aesthetic of science fiction, offering imaginary futures and alternatives that focus on the body. Her films, objects and interactive creations are about body manipulation, questioning concepts of identity, beauty, touch, smell and sensory perception.
McRae’s Future Day Spa creates a machine for hugging – strangely prescient in our current reality where many of those who live alone are missing the touch of another human due to social distancing. Her Institute of Isolation is also relevant in a world where the word isolation has taken on a whole other meaning. (See my review of Lucy’s work here when it was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2019.)
It’s fair to say that, with coronavirus, our society and our world is currently facing the biggest shift in everyday lived experience that most of us have ever known. Speculative Design could be a tool for us to unpack and solve many of the new challenges we face, from micro to macro scale, and to envision a new future. It also gives us scope to imagine alternative realities and futures for some of the other urgent problems in society today, such as design and sustainability and decolonising design.