It’s been a long old time, a two-month break from the blog. That’s the longest break I’ve had in a number of years. Truth is, I’m just extremely busy and never alone long enough to turn reading into writing or to think of things. I find myself in work-related conversations pausing or struggling because my brain is in the wrong gear and there’s too much to process.
I was away the last two weeks which gave some respite from the desk and the screen. Remarkably I really didn’t do any work. Just listened to some articles, rode my bike and hung out with kids really. About the best type of thing I could hope for. And now, the sun and warmth are returning which makes short training rides outside in London worthwhile. Having spent all winter training for racing, then getting Covid right at the beginning of the racing season I was quite demoralised but in April convinced myself to jump back on a pretty heavy training regime which seems to be paying off.
I think people on Instagram are sometimes disappointed that almost all my content there is cycling-related. Cycling is inherently visual so the medium leans toward it while as my work, (despite being design) is inherently text-based and so leans towards Twitter. I can’t fight these tendencies. Speaking of, they’re killing Tweetdeck for Mac next week and that’s going to seriously mess with my workflow.
I’ve said before about how I spend the week before a post just dumping links and notes into a form and then tidy it up before publishing? Well, imagine that for eight weeks. This place was an absolute mess so I just deleted most of it rather than try and remembe why I thought a particular link or sentence was insightful. I will leave you with this quote from Dan Olson of Line Goes Up fame from the Ezra Klein Show, presumably because I transcribed it by hand from the audio so I don’t want to have wasted that pain. In response to ‘What are Web 3 people actually trying to build?’:
Basically, if you go into any group and press them on that question, you’ll get a different answer and it may range from something that’s relatively cogent and focused about, well, ‘we’re trying to build decentralised systems of governance so that we could have a version of Twitter that is owned in fractional portions by every single user.’ And that’s a coherent goal regardless of whether or not you think it’s a feasible goal.
But then you go into a lot of others and it’s just a lot of wash about ‘well, we’re building something new.’ And it’s gonna be different and we’re gonna push corporations off the Internet. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s not a lot of coherence to it. There’s not a strong vision. There’s just a ‘vibe.’ There’s just an energy there about being involved in something that feels like the cutting edge regardless of whether or not anyone’s able to vocalise it. And a lot of crypto enthusiasts will point to that ineffability as the thing that get’s them excited. Oh we’ participating in something that’s so new that’s so radical that it’s difficult to even give voice to it.
Nick Foster on Design Thinking. I’m trying to make words like ‘intuition’ and ‘imagination’ ok in business settings so.
New Public ‘The Future is Small‘ featuring case studies of ‘smaller’ social apps that serve specific social groups including Strava which is probably my most used app.
I’ve discovered and have been enjoying Johannes Kleske’s blog, Seedlings, which gives some pretty good rigorous underpinning to futures studies. The latest one is about images of the future and the thinking of Fred Polak which is, you know, right up my alley. It’s nice to see people come back to blogging.
A Field Guide to The Living Internet from Udit Vira. Not presented in the most readable way but this idea of building out a regenerative future starting with the Internet as the fundamental infrastructure is smart.
Here’s a video of a swarm of drones navigating a forest.
Something I’ve learned over that break is about kitchens. I don’t mess with other people’s kitchens. I don’t like cooking in them and would appreciate if you didn’t ask me to. A kitchen is like a reflection of someone’s mind. You don’t want to get in there and start moving things around. Alright, love you and speak next week.
DS068-E346: As you might guess from the title. Something is changing with the digital sketches. More at the bottom.
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, a talk given by me in 2014, rounding up maybe a fifty projects in the area of speculative and critical design.
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.
DS060: A petrol (or gas) station at night. Two cars are hung from a steel ibeam and rotate slowly around the middle of the forecourt, like a big car mobile.
I finally got around to setting up the subscription service to this blog. So if you’d rather get these posts by email you can sign up down there ↙. Unfortunately, the animations won’t embed but you’ll get a nice still image. If you’re one of the fifty-odd folks already subscribed then welcome! Last week was a bit of a test, please send me any feedback on the email version. You can click through to see the animation, or they’re all on Instagram.
DS060
This week I decided to play around with some methods for photorealism. To be clear, the cars are found models from CGTrader already textured but the rest of the scene is done by me. Cars are whole projects in themselves but useful assets and I’m not into them enough to start modelling them by hand. I used various photos from petrol station from the internet to do some project-from-view UV mapping of the pumps, bins etc. similar to this method. There’s a big cube volume in there for depth and mood and then straightforward lighting. Following last week, I’ve found that adding in noise post-render undoes some of the painterly-ness of the de-noisers. All in all actually quite straightforward this week.
Prognostications
I missed this piece way back in 2020 – the promissory year of the self-driving car – untangling the complexities and hype to explain why we still didn’t have self-driving cars (spolier: we still don’t.) It’s rare to get excited about the future now, I think, for most. There are glimpses of it around elections and announcements but it often disappoints. I can never tell if it’s me that’s changed or the world, but the hysteria around a new iPhone or service seems to have vanished a little from the world. The excited word-of-mouth chatter for a new app or gadget has been replaced by rabid zealotry met with bitter dismissal. I’m looking forward to the remastered release of Witcher 3, though.
Anyway, rather than do a year-in-review of 2021 (which sounds like a lot of work) I thought I’d trawl some things from some of the articles that proliferate around this time of year about predictions for the coming twelve months, adjust or add my thoughts.
Fusion and Quantum enter the rhetorical arena. Azeem Azhar highlights the dramatic increases in funding for both quantum computing and nuclear fusion that 20/21 have seen. He did a great podcast episodes about both these technologies here and here. These are both technologies that seem reasonably exciting in actual application. Based on the financing alone, these seem like reasonably sure predictions but I’d add that I would also expect them both to get sucked into the rhetoric-hype vortex of silicon valley as a result of the increased funding interest. The tragedy is going to be seeing them put to the service of social networks and/or so-called AI in the pursuit of power. We might expect to see ‘quantum’ in particular dropped more and more into advertising and pitches to boost hype while (like AI) the technology itself is still in a very formative state.
You built it and now they’ve come: Crypto-exclusionism. Quite possibly the emergence of a social division between crypto people and non-crypto people. My views on this are pretty-well known if you read this: It all seems to be a technology that, despite the feverish defences put up, is being adopted by those in the relentless pursuit of the accumulation of personal wealth. The grotesque and rapid accumulation of personal wealth is regrettably one of the greatest drivers of the adoption of new technology and so crypto is now probably here to stay. (About ten years ago I mined SolarCoin in our studio and that was my first and last dabble.) A good test is to ask someone to explain crypto to you without mentioning money. I’m always up for hearing another argument or rationalisation but I have yet to hear it. Either way, similar to early social networks, as services become crypto-normalised, those who don’t engage may find certain services and products out of reach. Tech-exclusionism has impacted transportation already pretty severely in places where Uber et al have taken root and so the spread of crypto across digital transactions will probably exclude non-adopters; non-adopters of choice (like me) and those who are on the other side of the digital divide. Cryypto, like ‘digital’, ‘social’, ‘connected’ will just be in things without the need for its own prefix. Crypto will probably continue to be incredibly divisive in a way that things like smart phones, self-driving cars and even so-called AI, aren’t. You see, even the most fervent luddite can see the potential application of so-called AI in faster and more accurate medical diagnosis or climate modelling even if we need to scrutinise and critique the methods and tools. But with crypto, the voices of people working on more than the money need to be amplified. Tangentially, an even darker prediction is that the inevitable crypto crash will lead in the deeper entrenchment of right wing extremism, particularly in the US.
No rise of the machines. The Wall Street Journal has put together its predictions for next year. Nothing particularly surprising: More gadgets and gizmos aimed at dealing with manufactured inconveniences than anything meaningful. However, there’s a peculiar leaning on robotics in the domestic sphere, both delivery bots and chore-bots. I really struggle with seeing the story of these machines; why would anyone want them? They can move things around, sure, but they require a bunch of extra work from users to look after, charge, store etc. The dream of robots in the home is almost 150 years old and I don’t think 2022 is the year we’ll see it manifest.
Curiously muted AI expectations. Unusually, this report from the AI world implies more humility and pragmatism in the gradual, incremental developments of the field. That doesn’t mean the hype will go away but perhaps part of the normalisation of AI is it’s sublimation into other processes and the background noise of general technological innovation rather than big blowout AI-specific announcements. As above with crypto, we’re less likely to see ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ highlighted as advertising gimmicks as they’ll just be expected to be part of things in the same way ‘digital’ and ‘connected’ are.
Planetary Design. Alice Rawsthorn put it beautifully here. I think it’s increasingly going to be accepted as a mainstream approach to design in practice to think on planetary and giga scales about design interventions in the environment as well as the role that design has in communicating and conceptualising large systemic change. There’s been a flurry of new degrees established in the UK to corner this demand and work I’ve done with clients over the last year has shown that non-designers are developing an understanding of the potential.
Gamification of Fitness. It’s a little like smart fridges; there are gradual, incremental improvements but you really don’t need a gadget to know you ate too many doughnuts any more than you need a notification to know you’re out of milk. For some, maybe data does change behaviour (I know it works with my cycling) but in this prediction, health data is artificially loaded with financial value which reads a little bit like the Chinese social credit system but for corporations to profit off. The hope is that by being fitter, you become more ‘valuable’ in the most literal cosplay of Foucauldian biopolitics ever instantiated. It’s unclear why you would be more financially valuable by having a fitter or healthier dataset when everything from private health insurance to diet plans to medical research relies on you being unfit or at least paranoid about your fitness to profit.
Lifespan and reusability.This is a bit of a no-brainer. Partly due to ‘reading the room,’ partly because of actual legislation and partly because of the material issues in the next point, we may be seeing the end of the age of planned obsolescence. This has all sorts of implications for insurers and manufacturers but perhaps we’ll see them begin to tackle the enormous wastage of gadgetry. I would expect that this year or next we’d start to see lifespan and reusability as a marketing pitch on mainstream devices. Repair and reuse might also start to enter design curricula not as a novelty but as a fundamental.
It’s the coke, stupid. We had inklings of this with thing like the Evergiven crisis but 2022 could really be the year that the hidden material cost of tech starts to bite. The cost of silicon and chip manufacturing has been increasing through COVID but has also been affected by the environmental cost of turning Bauxite into Silicon crystals which requires huge amounts of coking coal, mostly supplied by China. But in other areas too are similar issues, a European requires about 15 tons of steel – also a coke-intensive process and other countries are catching up with this demand. There aren’t currently alternatives to the manufacturing processes of key materials like silicon and steel so the simple response is to stop using them. Canon has removed DRM chips from printer cartridges, ironically packaging chips with instructions on how to bypass the DRM.
I’m biased of course because my gut tells me that people are ready to turn away from technocentric solutionism and that there’s a popular and growing mistrust of Silicon Valley to deliver the utopias it’s promised as demonstrated through (for one example) the succession of issues that Facebook has faced but also the rising cost of living due to material and energy costs. Anyway, I won’t review these at the end of the year because they’ll be wrong.
The future is not only useless, its expensive. Well-written description of the dispiriting vacuousness of crypto culture. It’s a bit snobby on culture – I firmly believe that people like what they like and that their right – but the general notion of financial exploitation is great.
Again relatedly, Brad Troemel’s NFT Report, online now for free is a really great analysis of the bubble.
This report on the state of Web 3 has been getting a lot of attention. The tldr is: Web 3 is just Web 2 dressed up in clothes with less privacy but people are making money off it so they don’t care.
That was by no means everything. I’m doing an interview in two weeks where I’ve been asked to assemble some ‘weak signals’ – are there any ‘weak’ signals anymore? Feels like everything is pretty loud. Anyway, you know what I’m going to say. – that I love you. It’s my affectation for these blogs but it’s always important to let you know, I think. Also, my time is a little bit freer at the moment so let me know if you’d like to catch up, in person (fully boosted up here) or via teleconferencing. Have a great week.