SPECULATIVE DESIGN The Decay of Digital Things decay.io/dschool Elizabeth Goodman, Andrew Lovett-Baron, Maryanna Rogers

SPECULATIVE CULTURE

“The way that our society imagines itself through its forward-looking disciplines” — Bruce Sterling

Blade Runner

“When people think of design, most believe it is about problem solving. […] There are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could be — speculative design.”

Speculative design image goes here

Dunne + Raby Energy Futures

WHAT IS SPECULATIVE DESIGN?

Dunne + Raby Speculative Everything, p2

Present Futures

Possible

Plausible

Preferable

Probable

A TAXONOMY OF FUTURES

Redrawn from Speculative Everything redrawing Stuart Candy

“During the Indian Civil War, the Dharavi slums of Mumbai were flooded with refugees looking to escape the conflict. The Mumbai authorities, distracted by defence of the city and facing an already over-populated and poverty stricken slum could do little to maintain a semblance of civilised life in the area. Sometime later a cache of biological samples appeared through the criminal networks of Mumbai, in the vain hope that it might provide new marketable narcotic opportunities. The collective drive and expertise of the refugees managed to turn theses genetically-engineered fungal samples into a new type of infrastructure providing heat, light and building material for the refugees. Dharavi rapidly evolved its own micro-economy based around the mushrooms.”

Tobias Revell New Mumbai

Open questions THE AESTHETICS OF SPECULATION

Superflux Song of the Machine

Near Future Laboratory Corner Convenience

Open questions EVALUATING OUTCOMES

SPECULATIVE DESIGN SHOULD… “open up all sorts of possibilities that can be discussed, debated, and used to collectively define a preferable future for a given group of people: from companies, to cities, to societies.”

Speculative Everything, p6

The Extrapolation Factory 99¢ Futures

Open questions WHOSE FUTURES?

Neil Beloufa Kempinski

TO SUM UP Speculative design is…

Intended to be provocative rather than predictive or prescriptive

Illustrative of relationships of production, consumption, and circulation

Instantiated in objects as well as words

Amy Congdon Biological Atelier: “Extinct”