I wasn’t going to blog this week. For various reasons I’ve been up about 0430 the last few days and was doing some reading and the spirit took me. Although I’m a highly-gamified fiend for routine, I sometimes follow Matt Webb‘s advice that you should write when it comes to you.
Between Speculative Design and Generalism
My new role is ‘Design Futures Lead.’ I chose it (and I had the opportunity to name it) because ‘Specaultive Design Lead’ felt too narrow and specific and ‘Design Lead’ too generalist. I’m very gradually coming around to generalism (late to the party, huh), but I work at a firm full of designers of pipes and beams and smart energy grids and swarm robots and glass recycling systems and to claim leadership over the whole of design felt naive. After all, I don’t have any experience in architecture, fashion, ceramics and dozens of other highly specialised fields so I’d be shooting myself in the foot.
On the other side, ‘Speculative Design Lead’ was far too specific: I’ve contended for a long time that speculative design is a method; one particular way of approaching a problem or idea out of hundreds that might be equally, if not more appropriate. The rush of the design world to speculative design the hell our of everything in recent years comes at the cost of other, more appropriate, thoughtful and impactful approaches that might have been used, even if they might not attract the clicks.
It would also feel odd to say ‘I’m a speculative designer’ as if to exclude any number of other ways of working like design ethnography, critical technical practice (the root methodology of my languishing PhD), user experience design, non-human design and all the other methods I’ve used in recent projects.
So ‘Design Futures Lead’ felt right. It does what it say on the tin, has notional meaning to most people who are familiar with those two words even if they may have not seen them together, throws in the easy-listening wildcard of pluralising ‘future’ and gives me the opportunity to still do some speculative design while having the levity to see what’s beyond it. So, here I am as Design Futures Lead working on a strategy for what that means for the company and my colleagues. It’s an enormously exciting task and the eagerness and spirit of those around me to do some new, challenging things is really encouraging but I thought it useful at this point to reflect a little on ‘speculative design.’
As a caveat: I’m a hypocrite. We all are now, but while on one hand I’ll giddily mandate the destruction of definitions and silos around practices I will also get thoughtful, highly analytical and reflective about them half an hour later. So, I’m begging forgiveness if I later tell you that definitions, histories and disciplines are meaningless.
How We Got to Here.
Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life.
Dunne, A. (2009). Hertzian Tales
(Emphasis my own, this is possibly one of the first popularised uses of ‘speculative design’ though it appears in some journal articles pre-dating this from Dunne, Maze, Redstrom and others. Though the book was released in 2009, the thesis from which it’s drawn is from 1999.)
In 2013 I was invited by friend, mentor (and someone with double billing in this post) all-round A+’er Honor Harger to give a talk about speculative and critical design at the Lighthouse in Brighton, having completed the RCA’s Design Interactions quite recently and having a couple of touring exhibitions. She literally called me out of the blue while I was in a workshop trying not to electrocute myself on a motor. Remember when you could just call someone up?
Critical Exploits (credit to Julian Oliver for the name of the evening and the talk) was a smash through maybe fifty projects that could broadly be called ‘speculative and critical design.’ There weren’t many projects then, few courses were teaching it and almost all the practitioners knew each other because we’d all come from the same place – Design Interactions. Critical Exploits is still one of my most watched and referenced works and over the years. It’s evolved into what is now version twelve I think and I still happily give it, mostly for students, a couple of times a year but there’s maybe 150 projects in there now.
In the following years there was a push back against the Design Interactions graduate and teaching community, broadly rounded up, sometimes inaccurately, as ‘speculative designers’. Most of this push back came from places of genuine critique, change and growth as the conversation around decolonising was given space to grow. But some of it was deeply vicious and personal, coming from the political animus of the world of design academia. I read all of this and tried to learn and hope it was reflected in my teaching and talking; linking to better writing and thinking and underlining the limitations and shortcomings of the suddenly much-hyped field of ‘speculative design’ that was taking hold in commercial practice as evidenced by the sudden flurry of Medium blogs from UX, branding and marketing studios.
This sudden interest in 2016-17 in the work of artists and designer working in ‘speculative’ spaces was great and propelled the conversation forward. But it came at the cost of two things: Firstly a kind of promissory solutionism took hold; speculative design was the thing. Every company needed to be doing it. It was going to add value to projects. It was getting clicks and likes and shares and looked wild. This led to the second thing; the dropping of the ‘critical’ element of the name. In 2020 I sat on a panel for a speculative design award; half of the entires were just designs for future apps, autonomous cars, smart cities or gadgets. The element of criticality, for which speculation was a lever, had been overshadowed by the opportunity to create ‘edgy’ aesthetic-led future visions that supported pre-existing assumptions.
To return to Dunne’s quote that opened this block: Speculative design had become a thing in and of itself and instead of a method for leveraging and opening critical discourse that challenged preconceptions, it was used in support of them.
In April 2019. I wrote up a post expressing some of these frustrations and trying to pin it down. The clickbaity Five Problems With Speculative Design also led to a talk (unrecorded) at the Speculative Futures meet-up in London and some follow-up articles. It rounded up much of the things mentioned here: The lack of criticality, the anglophone-centrism, the service of it to supporting and reinforcing exploitative industries as well as other things like the general limitation of design at approaching system-scale issues beyond individual change or technical interventions and the need for something more urgent than the trickle-down effect of change. I still stand by most of the notions there even if they are pretty salty on reading back. I’d add in the personally-driven points of practice and discipline mentioned earlier.
Three Ammendments
So I thought I would make some amendments. Some more things that maybe aren’t new but start to clarify why I (and lots of others) find ‘Speculative Designer’ and the focus on it quite uncomfortable:
- It’s old now and comes from a particular time and place. First popularised in 2009, though mentioned in 1999 if not before, it’s done almost 25 years starting from a handful of researchers at a time when design research was just finding its feet, to a masters degree, to a global phenomena. This means two things: An unfortunate ossification around a canon of projects that always re-references itself. (I’m also complicit here I know with Critical Exploits) And, secondly, that that very specific time and place should be borne in mind; Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in the time of and after the 2008 financial crisis. This context created a particular thinking about design, society, power and people which it may well be inappropriate to duplicate to the present day in different places. The opportunity now is for new types of design, imagination and critique that maybe take the best bits of those practice but grow it into something better and more needed for today.
- Sticking with context: It’s an academic research tool. It was tested and validated as a way of producing knowledge, originally in the academic context of the juvenile field of design research but sometimes in applied contexts too. The speculation is never the outcome: What you learn or uncover in the discourse with others or yourself is the outcome. And, if it isn’t giving you useful, challenging or new knowledge then it wasn’t a useful speculation. Speculative design is still useful for producing knowledge in commercial projects (which I how I use it) but shouldn’t be lofted as the thing itself or it will overshadow the desired outcome for the project: challenging discourse, critique or meaningful change.
- The critical was – and still is – the most important part. Speculative and critical design was intended as a way for designers to challenge their own practices; one thing a designer might use in a research project to test themselves or their subject. One of the ciriticisms of it is that it’s design for designers to which my usual response is; ‘yes, that’s right.’ It doesn’t have to stay true to these origins of course but the value of the speculation (also goes to point above) is in what you do with it afterwards. If the speculation is simply meeting or amplifying inherited expectations about the future then it, again, is not useful. Whatever process, method or approach your design uses, it should, must be critical. It must be vulnerable and challenge yourself and others and be aware of its context and implications.
So that’s why ‘Design Futures.’ To be honest I might have chosen ‘Design Imaginaries’ but I think that may have been just one step too far. Maybe in a few years. Maybe in a few years I’ll add another addendum here, or maybe in a few years we’ll have closed the book a little on this and something better will have seized the collective imagination of designers.
DS068-E346 and a note on future renders
If you’re new here, this is where I write about this week’s render. It usually goes at the top but I wanted to keep the clickbait front and center. This week’s render marks a departure from the previous 67. I had a good chat with the aforementioned Honor Harger who gave me a really good idea so this week that idea starts. I’m not going to tell you what it is, I want to drip feed it because it’s also evolving in my head through the renders and I want to keep it quite organic and not commit to anything. From now on each render will be accompanied by a bit of text.
Don't try and change it. What precisely would be the point anyway? From here, the main corridor was dimly lit, the soft clicking of the lights providing the rhythm to our thoughts. It was tiring, keeping pace, even with our eyes. Had we been stood here longer, we might have been entranced or hypnotised to stay forever. Rhythm has a way of building a prison around you and soon enough it's all you ever knew. You find comfort in the walls; the gentle clicking of the lights. Yes, we might have stayed but there was still a long way to go.
Short Stuff
What, there wasn’t enough Long Stuff in this post? Next week, promise.
Sorry if this was another salty post. This is why I don’t agree with Matt Webb’s notion of writing when the spirit moves you even though he’s also right. You know I love you very, very, very much.