Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

“shifting design’s focus from designing for how the world is now to designing for how things could be” ⤴️
“Lubomír Doležel has called an “experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise.”” ⤴️
“Lubomír Doležel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “Our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” 3” ⤴️
“for reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration” ⤴️
“we start with laws, ethics, political systems, social beliefs, values, fears, and hopes, and how these can be translated into material expressions, embodied in material culture,” ⤴️
“In social and political science the focus is on modeling reality; in literary theory it is on the semantics of the real and nonreal; in fine art, make-believe theory and fiction; in game design, literal world creation; and even in science there are many rich strands of discourse around fictionalism, useful fictions, model organisms, and multiverses. 4” ⤴️
“Although technically a fictional world can be impossible and incomplete, whereas a possible world needs to be plausible, the limit for us is scientific possibility (physics, biology, etc.) everything else— ethics, psychology, behavior, economics, and so on—can be stretched to the breaking point.” ⤴️
“Lyman Tower Sargent suggests utopia has three faces: the literary utopia, utopian practice (such as intentional communities), and utopian social theory; 8” ⤴️
“here is a view that utopia is a dangerous concept that we should not even entertain because Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism are the fruits of utopian thinking. But these are examples of trying to make utopias real, trying to realize them, top down.” ⤴️
“Zygmunt Bauman captures the value of utopian thinking perfectly: “To measure the life “as it is” by a life as it should be (that is, a life imagined to be different from the life known, and particularly a life that is better and would be preferable to the life known) is a defining, constitutive feature of humanity.” 10” ⤴️
“critical science fiction in which dystopias are understood in relation to critical theory and the philosophy of science” ⤴️
“y sci-fi theorist Darko Suvin who uses the term cognitive estrangement, a development of Bertolt Brecht’s A-effect, to describe how alternate realities can aid critique of our own world through contrast.” ⤴️
“extrapolate today’s free market capitalist system to an extreme, weaving the narrative around hypercommodified human relations, interactions, dreams, and aspirations.” ⤴️
“expose at a human scale the limitations and failures of a free-market capitalist utopia, how, even if we achieve it, it is humanely reduced” ⤴️
“In these examples, it is the backdrop that interests us, not the narrative; the values of the society the story takes place in rather than the plot and characters.” ⤴️
“a piece of speculative economics exploring an alternative economic model to our own, a planned economy where everything is centrally controlled” ⤴️
“although both contain many imaginative proposals on a systemic level, they do not explore how these shifts would manifest themselves in the detail of everyday life.” ⤴️
“working the other way around—starting with designs that the viewer can use to imagine the kind of society that would have produced them, its values, beliefs, and ideologies.” ⤴️
“Basing the logic underlying a future community’s social relations on a dysfunctional taxi driver’s prejudices shows how random our customs can be and how brutality and social injustice can be shaped by strange, fictional narratives.” ⤴️
“To see the other city or one of its inhabitants is a “breach,”” ⤴️
“prompts all sorts of ideas about nationality, statehood, identity, and ideological conditioning to surface in the reader’s imagination.” ⤴️
“it is the reconceptualization of a simple and familiar technical idea, the border, that makes it relevant to design, again, more for its method than its content.” ⤴️
“the story unfolds through constant interactions, collisions, and fusions among real reality, imagined reality, simulated reality, remembered reality, and fictional reality.” ⤴️
“One strength for design is that its medium exists in the here and now. The materiality of design proposals, if expressed through physical props, brings the story closer to our own world away from the worlds of fictional characters.” ⤴️
“treat design speculations not as narratives or coherent “worlds” but as thought experiments—constructions, crafted from ideas expressed through design—that help us think about difficult issues.” ⤴️
“Thought experiments are usually done in fields where it is possible to precisely define limits and rules, such as mathematics, science (particularly physics), and philosophy (especially ethics) to test ideas, refute theories, challenge limits, or explore possible implications. 15” ⤴️
“reductio ad absurdum, a type of logical argument in which one assumes a claim for the sake of argument and derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome by taking it to its extreme, concluding that the original claim must have been wrong because it led to such an absurd result.” ⤴️
“highlight how dependent we have become on technology and how far removed we are from the processes and systems behind most of the technologies and devices our everyday lives depend on.” ⤴️
“the counterfactual. A historical fact is changed to see what might have happened, if… . It is sometimes used in history to understand the importance of key events and their influence on how the world turned out.” ⤴️
“a fresh alternative to future-based thinking by presenting parallel worlds as thought experiments rather than predictions.” ⤴️
“suggesting that if products were equipped with sensors they could dodge danger and survive longer before ending up in a landfill. They would also have the added benefit of creating strong emotional ties with their owners because of carefully designed animal-like behaviors that encourage people to project emotions onto them” ⤴️
“The project was presented through a variety of media, including a corporate video presentation explaining The Golden Institute’s history, structure and mission, a model of its HQ, and drawings and images of design proposals.” ⤴️
“Related to counterfactuals but more forward looking are what-if scenarios.” ⤴️
“he explores what might happen in a society in extreme circumstances, a sort of literary rehearsal involving individuals, elites, the government, media, and army.” ⤴️
like the run-through simulations they use to train emergency workers
“lack of apocalyptic drama and focus on middle-class British characters has led to the genre being termed cozy catastrophes by British author Brian Aldiss.” ⤴️
“Dog Tooth (2009) by Yorgos Lanthimos sets up an intriguing but simple premise from which all sorts of surprising and disturbing interactions between family members and the outside world take place. Two children are brought up to believe a number of myths created by their parents that shape their understanding of social relations, the outside world, and even language: the word for sea is chair, planes flying overhead are toys,” ⤴️
“AVL also explores, in detail, how the city would work economically and its optimal scale. The viewer never sees the whole system, just drawings of various scenes, architectural models, and prototype machinery.” ⤴️
“embrace the full aesthetic potential of working with unreality.” ⤴️
“The idea that something is not “real,” when real means it is available in shops, is not good.” ⤴️
“designers participate in the generation and maintenance of all sorts of fictions, from feature-heavy electronic devices meeting the imaginary needs of imaginary users, to the creation of fantasy brand worlds referenced through products, their content, and their use. D” ⤴️
“design has become so absorbed in industry, so familiar with the dreams of industry, that it is almost impossible to dream its own dreams, let alone social ones.” ⤴️
“We are interested in liberating this story making (not storytelling) potential, this dream- materializing ability, from purely commercial applications and redirecting it toward more social ends that address the citizen rather than the consumer or perhaps both at the same time.” ⤴️
“For us, the purpose of speculation is to “unsettle the present rather than predict the future.” 17” ⤴️
“design needs to decouple itself from industry, develop its social imagination more fully, embrace speculative culture” ⤴️
“Milan Kundera writes: “A novel examines not reality, but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.” 19 We think designers should strive for this, too.” ⤴️
“shifting design’s focus from designing for how the world is now to designing for how things could be” ⤴️
“Lubomír Doležel has called an “experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise.”” ⤴️
“Lubomír Doležel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “Our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” 3” ⤴️
“for reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration” ⤴️
“we start with laws, ethics, political systems, social beliefs, values, fears, and hopes, and how these can be translated into material expressions, embodied in material culture,” ⤴️
“In social and political science the focus is on modeling reality; in literary theory it is on the semantics of the real and nonreal; in fine art, make-believe theory and fiction; in game design, literal world creation; and even in science there are many rich strands of discourse around fictionalism, useful fictions, model organisms, and multiverses. 4” ⤴️
“Although technically a fictional world can be impossible and incomplete, whereas a possible world needs to be plausible, the limit for us is scientific possibility (physics, biology, etc.) everything else— ethics, psychology, behavior, economics, and so on—can be stretched to the breaking point.” ⤴️
“Lyman Tower Sargent suggests utopia has three faces: the literary utopia, utopian practice (such as intentional communities), and utopian social theory; 8” ⤴️
“here is a view that utopia is a dangerous concept that we should not even entertain because Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism are the fruits of utopian thinking. But these are examples of trying to make utopias real, trying to realize them, top down.” ⤴️
“Zygmunt Bauman captures the value of utopian thinking perfectly: “To measure the life “as it is” by a life as it should be (that is, a life imagined to be different from the life known, and particularly a life that is better and would be preferable to the life known) is a defining, constitutive feature of humanity.” 10” ⤴️
“critical science fiction in which dystopias are understood in relation to critical theory and the philosophy of science” ⤴️
“y sci-fi theorist Darko Suvin who uses the term cognitive estrangement, a development of Bertolt Brecht’s A-effect, to describe how alternate realities can aid critique of our own world through contrast.” ⤴️
“extrapolate today’s free market capitalist system to an extreme, weaving the narrative around hypercommodified human relations, interactions, dreams, and aspirations.” ⤴️
“expose at a human scale the limitations and failures of a free-market capitalist utopia, how, even if we achieve it, it is humanely reduced” ⤴️
“In these examples, it is the backdrop that interests us, not the narrative; the values of the society the story takes place in rather than the plot and characters.” ⤴️
“a piece of speculative economics exploring an alternative economic model to our own, a planned economy where everything is centrally controlled” ⤴️
“although both contain many imaginative proposals on a systemic level, they do not explore how these shifts would manifest themselves in the detail of everyday life.” ⤴️
“working the other way around—starting with designs that the viewer can use to imagine the kind of society that would have produced them, its values, beliefs, and ideologies.” ⤴️
“Basing the logic underlying a future community’s social relations on a dysfunctional taxi driver’s prejudices shows how random our customs can be and how brutality and social injustice can be shaped by strange, fictional narratives.” ⤴️
“To see the other city or one of its inhabitants is a “breach,”” ⤴️
“prompts all sorts of ideas about nationality, statehood, identity, and ideological conditioning to surface in the reader’s imagination.” ⤴️
“it is the reconceptualization of a simple and familiar technical idea, the border, that makes it relevant to design, again, more for its method than its content.” ⤴️
“the story unfolds through constant interactions, collisions, and fusions among real reality, imagined reality, simulated reality, remembered reality, and fictional reality.” ⤴️
“One strength for design is that its medium exists in the here and now. The materiality of design proposals, if expressed through physical props, brings the story closer to our own world away from the worlds of fictional characters.” ⤴️
“treat design speculations not as narratives or coherent “worlds” but as thought experiments—constructions, crafted from ideas expressed through design—that help us think about difficult issues.” ⤴️
“Thought experiments are usually done in fields where it is possible to precisely define limits and rules, such as mathematics, science (particularly physics), and philosophy (especially ethics) to test ideas, refute theories, challenge limits, or explore possible implications. 15” ⤴️
“reductio ad absurdum, a type of logical argument in which one assumes a claim for the sake of argument and derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome by taking it to its extreme, concluding that the original claim must have been wrong because it led to such an absurd result.” ⤴️
“highlight how dependent we have become on technology and how far removed we are from the processes and systems behind most of the technologies and devices our everyday lives depend on.” ⤴️
“the counterfactual. A historical fact is changed to see what might have happened, if… . It is sometimes used in history to understand the importance of key events and their influence on how the world turned out.” ⤴️
“a fresh alternative to future-based thinking by presenting parallel worlds as thought experiments rather than predictions.” ⤴️
“suggesting that if products were equipped with sensors they could dodge danger and survive longer before ending up in a landfill. They would also have the added benefit of creating strong emotional ties with their owners because of carefully designed animal-like behaviors that encourage people to project emotions onto them” ⤴️
“The project was presented through a variety of media, including a corporate video presentation explaining The Golden Institute’s history, structure and mission, a model of its HQ, and drawings and images of design proposals.” ⤴️
“Related to counterfactuals but more forward looking are what-if scenarios.” ⤴️
“he explores what might happen in a society in extreme circumstances, a sort of literary rehearsal involving individuals, elites, the government, media, and army.” ⤴️
like the run-through simulations they use to train emergency workers
“lack of apocalyptic drama and focus on middle-class British characters has led to the genre being termed cozy catastrophes by British author Brian Aldiss.” ⤴️
“Dog Tooth (2009) by Yorgos Lanthimos sets up an intriguing but simple premise from which all sorts of surprising and disturbing interactions between family members and the outside world take place. Two children are brought up to believe a number of myths created by their parents that shape their understanding of social relations, the outside world, and even language: the word for sea is chair, planes flying overhead are toys,” ⤴️
“AVL also explores, in detail, how the city would work economically and its optimal scale. The viewer never sees the whole system, just drawings of various scenes, architectural models, and prototype machinery.” ⤴️
“embrace the full aesthetic potential of working with unreality.” ⤴️
“The idea that something is not “real,” when real means it is available in shops, is not good.” ⤴️
“designers participate in the generation and maintenance of all sorts of fictions, from feature-heavy electronic devices meeting the imaginary needs of imaginary users, to the creation of fantasy brand worlds referenced through products, their content, and their use. D” ⤴️
“design has become so absorbed in industry, so familiar with the dreams of industry, that it is almost impossible to dream its own dreams, let alone social ones.” ⤴️
“We are interested in liberating this story making (not storytelling) potential, this dream- materializing ability, from purely commercial applications and redirecting it toward more social ends that address the citizen rather than the consumer or perhaps both at the same time.” ⤴️
“For us, the purpose of speculation is to “unsettle the present rather than predict the future.” 17” ⤴️
“design needs to decouple itself from industry, develop its social imagination more fully, embrace speculative culture” ⤴️
“Milan Kundera writes: “A novel examines not reality, but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.” 19 We think designers should strive for this, too.” ⤴️