Braton, Benjamin (2016) — On Speculative Design

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

The Material Turn in Design

Design’s new materials

  • The real value of emerging materials lies not only in what we can make with them, but in how they force us to revisit fundamental questions about identity, location, and being.

Material culture and pathology

  • Design often serves to make our pathological relationships to material culture more efficient and delightful, **but ends up reinforcing those very problems.

Materialism as origin of design

  • To mobilize Speculative Design (SD) toward not-yet-existing conditions, we must return to the actual matter of materialism.

  • Design practice is interested in what can be done with materials.

  • Speculative Design is interested in what materials reveal about being human.

Design as Speculation

Predictive vs. Speculative Models

  • Predictive models are descriptive and adaptive.

  • Speculative models are prescriptive and normative — they imagine possible futures.

    Between them we track different uses for contingency, imminence, simulation, navigation, resistance, governmentality, universality, neutrality, etc

  • Here, Design becomes designation — it names and frames possible worlds.

Beyond Futurity

  • SD resist or eliminate “futurity” as its focus, shifting instead toward immediate spatial and temporal contexts, designing for the “here and now.”

Scales of Futurity

  • Bratton outlines several overlapping temporalities:

    • Social future (fashion cycles, communal memory)

    • Technical future (product and mechanical evolution)

    • Historical future (friend/enemy relations, cultural memory)

    • Geologic future (planetary rhythms beyond human life)

Domains of Speculative Design

Domain Central Concern Core Speculative Question
Human–AI Interaction Empathy and identity in synthetic life How will we guide AI’s evolution as part of the living world?
Ubiquitous Computation Digital–physical continuum How do representation and reality merge?
Synthetic Biology Programmable life Will biology become code, or code become life?
Epidermal Sensors Blurred boundary of body and world What is the new “skin” of communication?
Machine Vision AI perception and aesthetics How do machines see us differently?
Human Hand & Mobile Device Embodied technology use How do our bodies evolve with our tools?
High-Res Sensing & Fabrication Material precision and planetary design How do new material capabilities reshape culture and society?

Cultural and Technological Acceleration

  • Autonomous traditions (slow-evolving, rooted practices) are accelerated by technological change.

  • Everyday urbanism becomes modular and adaptive, like the International Space Station, reconfigurable, scalable, and interdependent.

  • The history of design is also the history of new modeling practices — from GUIs to big data — that shape what we imagine can be made.

Quotes for reflection

“Sometimes you build a kite and it evolves into 4Chan.”

“Emerging technologies are developing faster than our conceptual frameworks can orient them.”

“Our current thinking both enables and limits meaningful innovation.”

“Maximizing engineering while neglecting critical design thinking is irrational.”

Ethics and Ambiguity in Speculative Design

Ambivalence as strength

  • The more a project makes you uncertain — utopian or horrifying, cure or poison — the more valuable it is.

  • Ambiguity, abstraction, and ambivalence are signs of success, not failure.

  • If the ethical answer is obvious, the project is too simple.

Speculative vs. Regular Design

  • Regular design solves practical problems.

  • Speculative design provokes reflection and challenges assumptions.

  • Its goal is productive ambiguity, not clarity or usability.

Beyond Human-Centered Design

  • “Human-centered design” may itself be part of the problem.

  • The crisis of the Anthropocene reveals the limits of anthropocentrism — a worldview that places humans at the center.

  • Moving forward requires decentering the human: understanding humanity as one form of life and matter among many.

To conclude: What is called “human-centered design” (sometimes interchangeable with “User-Centered Design”) is not only not the solution, it is quite often the problem. The interest, to be clear, is not to eliminate (or to claim to eliminate) human sentience, sapience and affect from these rich dramas, but to conceptualize the world and to compose with it according to models that locate human specificity in a more deliberately dispassionate position.

“Design scaled to the scope of the real, not reality downsampled toward the digestible.”

After Thoughts

Reorienting toward posthuman or planetary design requires new ethical frameworks (perhaps feminist or relational) that can absorb the personal sacrifices implied by long-term, collective futures.

  • Shift from human-centered to relational/ecological thinking

    • Design isn’t just about individual users; it must consider interconnected systems.

  • Ethics must handle complexity and trade-offs

    • Long-term, collective goals often conflict with short-term individual desires.

    • Ethical frameworks must guide decisions that balance these tensions.

  • Potential frameworks suggested

    • Feminist ethics: Care, attention, and relational responsibility.

    • Relational ethics: Responsibility to networks of beings (human and nonhuman).