Design Practice and Research
They, too, draw on the generative value of the speculative in their book, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming that “propose[s] a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas” and “pose ‘what if’ questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).”3 Also speaking to the value of the speculative, Ursula Le Guin frames it (here, the “future”) as “a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in, a means of thinking about reality, a method.”4 In my understanding, speculative pursuits are interdisciplinary, multi-modal, and exist in many places and formats simultaneously. The term belongs to no one practitioner, field, or body of work, but offers a mode to approach something, anything, with the power of “what if.”
Footnotes:
- See, for instance, James Auger, “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation,” Digital Creativity 24, no. 1 (2013): 11–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.767276; Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge: MIT, 2008); Matthew Malpass, Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practices (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
- “About Us,” Dunne & Raby, accessed November 26, 2018, http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/biography.
- “Books & Limited Editions: Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming,” Dunne & Raby, accessed November 26, 2018, http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/books/690/0.
- Quoted in Eileen Gunn, “How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-your-future-180951169/.