Speculative Everything

1. Design's Expanded Purpose: Beyond Problem-Solving

Rather than giving up altogether, though, there are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could be-speculative design.

Beyond superficial fixes. Traditional design often focuses on solving immediate problems, making technology user-friendly, appealing, and consumable. However, many pressing global challenges, such as climate change or overpopulation, are "wicked problems" that cannot be fixed by technology alone; they demand fundamental shifts in human values, beliefs, and behavior. Design's inherent optimism, while usually beneficial, can sometimes lead to a denial of deeper issues, diverting energy into superficial adjustments rather than addressing the underlying attitudes that shape our world.

Catalyst for redefinition. Speculative design offers a powerful alternative, leveraging imagination to open new perspectives on these complex problems. It aims to create spaces for discussion and debate about radically different ways of being, inspiring people to let their imaginations flow freely. This approach acts as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality, moving beyond mere prediction of "The Future" to actively exploring "possible futures" as tools for understanding the present and shaping desired (or undesired) outcomes.

Mapping possible futures. These speculative futures are typically presented as scenarios, often initiated by "what-if" questions, designed to be provocative, simplified, and fictional. They invite viewers to suspend disbelief and consider how things could be, rather than dictating how they should be. This framework distinguishes between:

• Probable: What is likely to happen (where most conventional design operates).
• Plausible: What could happen (the realm of scenario planning and foresight).
• Possible: What might happen (scientifically feasible, with a believable, albeit fictional, path from the present).
• Preferable: What people truly want, collectively defined, rather than imposed by designers or industry.

2. Conceptual Design: A Space for Ideas and Ideals

Conceptual designs are not only ideas but also ideals, and as the moral philosopher Susan Neiman has pointed out, we should measure reality against ideals, not the other way around: 'Ideals are not measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals.'

A parallel design channel. Conceptual design operates in a unique "parallel design channel," liberated from the immediate pressures of the market. This freedom allows it to explore ideas and issues that extend beyond commercial viability, encompassing new aesthetic possibilities for technology, the social, cultural, and ethical implications of scientific advancements, and large-scale societal concerns like democracy, sustainability, or alternative economic models. It is fundamentally about design as ideas, rather than solely for physical realization.

Embracing unreality. Unlike social or humanitarian design, which typically works within the confines of existing reality, conceptual design celebrates its unreality. It delves into "how things could be," rather than merely improving existing conditions. Examples such as Patrick Stevenson-Keating's The Quantum Parallelograph or Marti Guixe's MTKS-3 function as "props" that swiftly engage the imagination, their conceptual nature clearly signaled without diminishing their profound impact on thought.

Ideas as the core. While often dismissed as "just an idea," conceptual design asserts that novel ideas are precisely what contemporary society urgently needs. It provides an essential alternative to market-driven design, serving as a vital space for intellectual exploration and the testing of ideals. This approach is evident across various design disciplines:

• Graphic Design: Metahaven's Facestate critiques the blurring lines between consumerism and citizenship.
• Fashion: Hussein Chalayan's visionary "airplane dress" or Comme des Garçons' conceptual garments.
• Furniture: The Dutch design group Droog's conceptualism, Jurgen Bey's Slow Car, and Marti Guixe's Food Facility.
• Architecture: From "paper architecture" to Peter Eisenman's House VI, which deliberately prioritized formal ideas over practicalities.

3. Critical Design: Questioning the Status Quo

Critical design is critical thought translated into materiality. It is about thinking through design rather than through words and using the language and structure of design to engage people.

Purposeful critique. Critical design, a term coined by Dunne & Raby in the mid-nineties, employs speculative proposals to challenge ingrained assumptions about the role products play in daily life. It embodies an attitude—a stance against "affirmative design" that merely reinforces the existing order. It is not simply negative criticism, but rather a skeptical fascination with technology, meticulously dissecting the hopes, fears, promises, and market-driven limitations inherent in technological development.

Beyond mere commentary. Effective critical design invariably offers an alternative, creating a crucial "gap between reality as we know it and the different idea of reality" to stimulate profound discussion. It is fundamentally positive and idealistic, driven by the belief that change is possible through challenging prevailing values and beliefs. For example, The Statistical Clock (Dunne & Raby with Michael Anastassiades) confronts us with unconventional needs, hinting at a parallel world where existential reminders of life's fragility are desired.

Dark design and humor. Critical design frequently explores darker themes, not for negativity's sake, but to counteract naive techno-utopianism and provoke action. Projects like Bernd Hopfengaertner's Belief Systems serve as cautionary tales, fast-forwarding to futures where disparate technologies converge to streamline interactions, potentially at the expense of human autonomy. Satire and black humor are vital tools, creating a dilemma for the viewer: "Is it serious or not? Real or not?" This intellectual engagement fosters "complicated pleasure" and encourages shifts in perspective and understanding.

4. Functional Fictions: Exploring Scientific Implications

By facilitating debate on the implications of advanced research in science, design can take on a practical, almost social purpose, and in doing so, play a role in the democratization of technological change by widening participation in debates about future technologies.

Moving upstream. Design has the potential to intervene much earlier in the innovation pipeline, moving beyond finished products and technologies to the conceptual or research stage of science. This upstream engagement is crucial in our "extreme times," where fields like genetics, synthetic biology, and neuroscience are fundamentally altering our understanding of life itself. Designers can create "useful fictions" to proactively debate the ethical, cultural, social, and political implications of scientific breakthroughs before they become entrenched realities.

Citizen-consumers. Public discourse on science often occurs at an abstract, citizen level, yet our collective behavior as consumers ultimately shapes the materialization of these advancements. Functional fictions bridge this gap by presenting fictional products, services, and systems from alternative futures, enabling people to engage critically as "citizen-consumers." This approach subverts conventional design language, shifting discussions from abstract generalities to tangible, relatable examples grounded in everyday consumer experience.

Examples of bio-speculation:

• Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots (Auger & Loizeau): Explores microbial fuel cells powering domestic robots using insects or rodents.
• Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow (James King): Imagines how lab-grown meat might be shaped and textured to resemble traditional cuts.
• Manufacturing Monroe (Emily Hayes): A darker vision of tissue engineering producing celebrity souvenirs.
• Biophilia: Survival Tissue (Veronica Ranner): An incubator using human skin, questioning built-in obsolescence for semi-living products.
• The Smell of Control (Kevin Grennan): Robots secreting hormones to influence human behavior, probing the ethics of human-robot integration.
• Life Support (Revital Cohen): Transgenic animals as external organ replacements, challenging the dehumanizing aspects of medical technology.
• I Wanna Deliver a Shark (Ai Hasegawa): A woman hosting an endangered shark, raising questions about female reproductive power and species preservation.
• All That I Am (Koby Barhad): Designing an "Elvis Presley mouse" to provoke thought on the nature of "self" in genetically engineered life.

5. Fictional Worlds & Thought Experiments: Methodological Playgrounds

The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands. Literary fiction is probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise.

Imagination as a tool. Speculation fundamentally relies on imagination—the capacity to conceive of alternatives and evaluate potential futures. Design can draw rich inspiration from "speculative culture," particularly literature and fine art, which excel at pushing the boundaries of fiction. The primary goal is not mere entertainment, but rather reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration, translating abstract laws, ethics, and social beliefs into tangible material expressions.

Utopias and dystopias. Fictional worlds, ranging from Thomas More's Utopia to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984, serve as powerful stimuli for idealism or stark cautionary tales. They explore political and social possibilities, often by extrapolating current systems to their logical extremes. Philip K. Dick's novels, for instance, depict worlds where everything is marketized, trapping characters within commercially defined options. Contemporary works like the Black Mirror miniseries fast-forward today's technologies into unsettling, often nightmarish, human consequences.

Ideas as stories and thought experiments. Some literary works, such as Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, elevate "the story of an idea" to the central narrative, exploring alternative economic models. Dougal Dixon's After Man speculates on post-human biology through concrete animal designs. Margaret Atwood's "speculative literature" (e.g., Oryx and Crake) extrapolates real scientific research into imaginary, yet plausible, commercial products, focusing on their profound social and ethical implications. Design can also employ:

• Reductio ad absurdum: Thomas Thwaites's The Toaster Project highlights our technological dependence by attempting to build a toaster from raw materials.
• Counterfactuals: James Chambers's Attenborough Design Group imagines David Attenborough as an industrial designer, creating products with animal-inspired survival instincts. Sascha Pohflepp's The Golden Institute explores an alternate America with radical energy policies if Jimmy Carter had defeated Ronald Reagan.
• What-ifs: John Wyndham's "cozy catastrophes" examine societal reactions to extreme disasters, such as alien invasions or genetically modified killer plants.

6. Physical Fictions: Props for Imagination

The presence of the prop in the same space as the imaginer also makes the experience more vivid, more alive, and more intense.

Intentional fictional objects. Speculative design objects are "physical fictions" that deliberately celebrate their unreal status, often functioning as "props for nonexistent films." Unlike conventional film props, which must be immediately legible to advance a plot, speculative design props can embrace ambiguity, challenging viewers to actively engage their imagination and construct the world to which these objects belong. Patricia Piccinini's The Young Family, a hyper-realistic, life-sized model of a transgenic creature, serves as a powerful example, prompting diverse individual interpretations of a possible future.

Make-believe theory. These props "prescribe imaginings" and "generate fictional truths," aligning with Kendall L. Walton's theory of make-believe. They are meticulously designed to facilitate imaginative engagement, helping us entertain novel ideas about everyday life and critically examine the ideals and values embedded in our material culture. Crucially, they are not intended to mimic reality or enable role-playing, but rather to expand imaginative horizons and offer new perspectives.

User as imaginer and suspension of disbelief. Viewers are transformed into active "imaginers," performing a kind of "imaginary archeology" on the displayed artifacts. This process necessitates a willing "suspension of disbelief," which liberates the design from the constraints of strict realism and opens up vast possibilities for aesthetic experimentation. Projects like Troika's Plant Fiction utilize hyper-realistic computer renderings of visually plausible, yet technically fictional, plants to subtly signal their speculative status. The "design voice" can also be manipulated, moving beyond expected product language to the designer's unique perspective, as exemplified by Dunne & Raby's Technological Dreams No.7: Robots or Sputniko's Menstruation Machine.

7. Aesthetics of Unreality: Crafting the Ambiguous

This is where the aesthetic challenge for speculative design lies, in successfully straddling both. To fall on either side is too easy.

Beyond realism. Designing for unreality demands a delicate balance, simultaneously capturing both the "real" and the "not-real." This approach transcends clumsy parody or pastiche, which often over-reference the familiar in an attempt to appear realistic. The aim is a poetic and subtle engagement with ambiguity, surprising the viewer and fostering active participation rather than passive consumption of meaning.

Diverse aesthetic approaches:

• CGI: While often constrained by generic styles, CGI can create compelling "mixed realities" (Superflux's Song of the Machine) or disturbing simplicity (Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation's anti-smoking campaign).
• Illustration & Sketches: Architect John Hejduk's visionary architectural sketches or Ettore Sottsass's Planet as Festival use abstraction to signal their speculative nature, inviting imaginative daydreams. Paul Noble's Nobson Newtown pushes visionary architecture into surreal, fantastical spaces.
• Detailed Drawings: The anatomical features of Japanese manga monsters in Kaiju-Kaijin Daizenshu or Ginsberg & Pohflepp's Growth Assembly (bioengineered plants) craft plausibility through intricate, impossible details.
• Photography: Filip Dujardin's Fictions recombines existing architectural features into subtly odd, fictional structures, challenging perceptions of reality. Josef Schulz's Formen series abstracts industrial structures to heighten their alien quality.
• Model Aesthetics: Thomas Demand's immaculate cardboard sets or El Ultimo Grito's Imaginary Architectures use stripped-down forms to straddle fictional and actual realities, inviting imaginative projection.
• Character as Prop: Characters can powerfully convey ideas and values, as seen in Sputniko's Menstruation Machine: Takashi's Take or the Prometheus film's David 8 android.
• Atmospheres of Strangeness: From George Lucas's THX 1138 "nonplaces" to Lars von Trier's abstracted Dogville sets, constructed environments introduce estrangement. "Hidden realities" in photography (Lynne Cohen, Lucinda Devlin's The Omega Suites) capture the alien quality of utilitarian, often disturbing, institutional spaces, serving as proto-images for speculative aesthetics.

8. Dissemination: Engaging Publics with Speculative Futures

If, rather than looking back in time, we presented people with fictional artifacts from alternative versions of our own society or its possible future, would people begin to relate to them in the same way-a sort of speculative material culture, fictional archeology, or imaginary anthropology?

Platforms for engagement. Speculative designs are inherently meant to circulate and engage diverse audiences. Exhibitions, publications, press, and the internet serve as crucial channels, each presenting unique opportunities and challenges regarding accessibility and audience reach. Museums and galleries, traditionally showcasing existing products or historical movements, can be reimagined as "experimental spaces" for critical reflection, presenting speculative designs as a form of "imaginary anthropology."

Speculative Wunderkammer. Exhibitions like Dunne & Raby's "What If..." for the Science Gallery in Dublin framed each exhibit as a question, inviting visitors to step out of their everyday reality and speculate on specific scientific implications. Projects such as The Cloud Project (Catherine Kramer and Zoe Papadopoulou) utilized an ice cream van as a mobile platform for discussing nanotechnology, blending the experience of tasting technologically modified food with debates on potential health implications.

Imaginary institutions and chain reactions. The EPSRC Impact! project presented design interpretations of scientific research within a gallery designed to evoke an "imaginary research institute," fostering dialogue between designers, scientists, and the public. Projects like Revital Cohen's Phantom Recorder (exploring recording phantom limb sensations) or Superflux's The 5th Dimensional Camera (imagining photography of parallel universes) explored poetic and impossible applications. The "Between Reality and the Impossible" exhibition used objects, photographs, and texts to create a "chain reaction," allowing visitors to piece together their own ideas about projects such as Foragers, which explored human evolution and external digestive systems in an overpopulated world.

9. Speculative Everything: A Catalyst for Social Dreaming

If our belief systems and ideas don't change, then reality won't change either. It is our hope that speculating through design will allow us to develop alternative social imaginaries that open new perspectives on the challenges facing us.

Subverting spectacle for public good. Stephen Duncombe argues that the radical left has historically overlooked the power of fantasy and fabricated realities. Speculative design can strategically embrace this, subverting spectacle for progressive politics and the public good. It aims to be inspirational, infectious, and catalytic, addressing values and ethics at a systemic level, thereby blurring the distinctions between the "real" real and the "unreal" real.

Free agents and viable alternatives. In contrast to "nudge" theory, which subtly manipulates behavior, speculative design empowers individuals as "free agents" by presenting a multitude of options. It makes "viable and not so viable possibilities tangible and available for consideration," as Erik Olin Wright suggests. This process contributes significantly to reimagining reality and our relationship to it, broadening our collective conception of what is truly possible.

One million little utopias. Philip K. Dick's concept of "plural realities" posits that each human inhabits a unique world. Speculative design can give tangible form to these individualistic "micro-utopias," from Timothy Archibald's Sex Machines to Tsuzuki Kyoichi's Image Club environments. While "big design" (e.g., Buckminster Fuller, Norman Bel Geddes, the RAND Corporation, the Soviet Ekranoplan) once offered grand, top-down visions, contemporary dreaming is often constrained by military priorities or short-term market demands. Speculative design aims to unlock people's imaginations, fostering bottom-up dreaming rather than imposing mega-utopias.

10. The United Micro-Kingdoms: Designing Alternative Realities

By presenting the viewer with design proposals for objects, would they imagine the world the designs belong to and move from the specific to the general?

Designing states through objects. Inspired by nation-building guides and political charts, Dunne & Raby embarked on an exploration of alternative ideological systems. For "The United Micro-Kingdoms" exhibition, they envisioned England devolved into four distinct supershires, each functioning as an experimental zone with its own unique form of governance, economy, and lifestyle. The core challenge was to convey these large-scale, systemic ideas through small, concrete design proposals.

Transport as ideological embodiment. Vehicles were chosen as the primary medium, embodying the distinct ideologies, values, and energy sources of a post-fossil-fuel England. Each vehicle acts as a synecdoche, representing more than just itself. The four micro-kingdoms were:

• Digitarians: A society governed by totalitarian digital technology and market forces, characterized by pervasive surveillance and data logging. Their "digicars" are utilitarian appliances optimizing tariffs and routes, prioritizing digital footprint and privacy over traditional speed.
• Bioliberals: A social democratic society embracing biotechnology, living in symbiosis with an enhanced natural world. Their "biocars" are slow, bulky, organically grown, and biofueled, reflecting a fundamental shift from speed to sustainability.
• Anarcho-Evolutionists: A society that largely abandons conventional technology, focusing instead on maximizing human capabilities through DIY biohacking and self-experimentation. Their "Very Large Bike (VLB)" emphasizes cooperation and sociality, designed for group travel on abandoned motorways.
• Communo-Nuclearists: A no-growth, limited-population society living on a three-kilometer-long, nuclear-powered mobile landscape. Their "train" is a highly disciplined, centralized micro-state, a "voluntary prison of pleasure" offering luxury and isolation from the Anthropocene.

Catalyst for questioning. This project powerfully demonstrates how design, drawing inspiration from policy, social science, and the surrounding world, can express imaginative speculations. It sketches out possibilities, maintaining provocative qualities despite rigorous research. The project's value lies not in offering definitive solutions, but in providing "complicated pleasure," enriching mental lives, and challenging everyday assumptions, ultimately serving as a catalyst for social dreaming by presenting "another way" rather than prescribing "the better way."

Last updated: December 28, 2025