Speculative design

When traditional design not enough, it may be time to consider other approaches.

The head of Meta recently announced that people who don’t use virtual/augmented reality glasses will experience cognitive disadvante in the future. That kind of warning is fragile at best, and, frankly, flawed. It’s common for us to think that technological development is related to the emergence of more products and that the only way to solve society’s problems is through more things being designed and built.

Another way to call this is: Design crisis.

Now, Bruce Sterling has a very interesting perspective on this. For him, the way design works industrially is unprecedented and aims to create many new things. At the same time, production methods are unsustainable. In other words, we create on a large scale with finite or toxic materials, often causing wars. So how can we produce new things differently from how we do today?

Dunne and Rabby also have an interesting phrase for this phenomenon:

… many of the challenges we face today are insoluble and the only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior.

Therefore, the traditional design approach is no longer sufficient. Creating services, applications, and products is an outdated way of advancing society. We need new approaches: Critical Design aims to change ways of acting in society through artifacts. Design fiction uses fictional narratives to ponder other (often future) possibilities, and Speculative Design, the subject of this post, proposes hypothetical future scenarios to debate what future we want to build.

Ultimately, these approaches have a different goal. Rather than creating products, human experiences, or behavioral changes, they aim to produce fresh ideas to envision new possibilities for the world. And this is especially true for speculative design.