Quotes
When people think of design, most believe it is about problem solving. Even the more expressive forms of design are about solving aesthetic problems. Faced with huge challenges such as overpopulation, water shortages, and climate change, designers feel an overpowering urge to work together to fix them, as though they can be broken down, quantified, and solved. Design’s inherent optimism leaves no alternative but it is becoming clear that many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior.
Although essential most of the time, design’s inbuilt optimism can greatly complicate things, first, as a form of denial that the problems we face are more serious than they appear, and second, by channeling energy and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there.
They (Speculative designs) usually take the form of scenarios, often starting with a what-if question, and are intended to open up spaces of debate and discussion; therefore, they are by necessity provocative, intentionally simplified, and fictional.
We rarely develop scenarios that suggest how things should be because it becomes too didactic and even moralistic.
How designs are evaluated is also closely linked to a thorough understanding of probable futures, although it is rarely expressed in those terms.
assuming it is possible to create more socially constructive imaginary futures, could design help people participate more actively as citizen-consumers? And if so, how?
Not in trying to predict the future but in using design to open up all sorts of possibilities that can be discussed, debated, and used to collectively define a preferable future for a given group of people: from companies, to cities, to societies. Designers should not define futures for everyone else but working with experts, including ethicists, political scientists, economists, and so on, generate futures that act as catalysts for public debate and discussion about the kinds of futures people really want.
Design can give experts permission to let their imaginations flow freely, give material expression to the insights generated, ground these imaginings in everyday situations, and provide platforms for further collaborative speculation.
First, during the 1980s design became hyper-commercialized to such an extent that alternative roles for design were lost. … Design became fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically unviable and therefore irrelevant.
Second, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War the possibility of other ways of being and alternative models for society collapsed as well
(Third,) society has become more atomized. As Zygmunt Bauman writes in Liquid Modernity, we have become a society of individuals. People work where work is available, travel to study, move about more, and live away from their families.
Fourth, the downgrading of dreams to hopes once it became clear that the dreams of the twentieth century were unsustainable, as the world’s population has more than doubled in the last forty-five years to seven billion. The great modernist social dreams of the post-war era probably reached a peak in the 1970s when it started to become clear that the planet had limited resources and we were using them up fast.
This dissatisfaction with existing models coupled with new forms of bottom-up democracy enhanced by social media make this a perfect time to revisit our social dreams and ideals and design’s role in facilitating alternative visions rather than defining them.
But to do this, we need more pluralism in design, not of style but of ideology and values.
The spectrum of conceptual design is broad. Each area of design has its own form and is used in different ways. At one end it is very close to conceptual art and is about pure ideas, often to do with the medium itself. Much applied art, ceramics, furniture, and device art, for example, sit here. At the other end of the spectrum conceptual design means a parallel space of speculation that uses hypothetical or, more accurately, fictional products to explore possible technological futures. Industrial and product design usually operate at this end. This is the end we are interested in.
from A Map of Unreality
Conceptual Art Examples
“Sentences on Conceptual Art” 12 (1969) LeWitt
Metahaven, political speculative design https://www.instagram.com/metahaven/ https://onlineopen.org/mobile-money-the-near-future https://walkerart.org/magazine/metahavens-facestate
Facestate is a research project about these and other parallels between social networks and the state. It is about politicians hailing the entrepreneurship of Mark Zuckerberg, about the neoliberal dream of minimal government interference, about the governance of social networks, about face recognition, about debt, about the future of money and currency in social networks, and about the dream of total participation. And it is about Facebook as a back door for government surveillance.
Facestate is a world where, for the government, you are your smartphone. All the components of the installation at the Walker are models of smartphones. Not all of them “represent” something. Plexiglass smartphones and a passport that becomes a password are some of the objects shown. Some of the devices are more abstract than others. One phone is a platform carrying tantalum powder, the rare element mined in the Congo and used in most smartphones. Some other phones are shaped as masks. A mask is a tool important for its capacity to hide identity or present a pseudonym. We are opposed to the idea that everyone should always participate in the Internet under his “real name,” as is Mark Zuckerberg’s mission.
Abake https://cleargallerytokyo.com/fugu-okul-part1
Daniel Eatock, act of painting, medium https://eatock.com/about/daniel-eatock/2/ https://www.instagram.com/eatockdaniel/
Light and shadow, installation, power of the small, mundane https://www.ryotakuwakubo.com/
Dark humour https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/2922-dunne-raby-the-statistical-clock ![[Pasted image 20251122213126.png]] ![[Pasted image 20251122213141.png]]
Citizen-Consumer
It is only when products are bought that they enter everyday life and have an effect. The act of buying determines our technological future. By presenting people with fictional products, services, and systems from alternative futures people can engage critically with them as citizen-consumers. Being faced with a complex mix of contradictory emotions and responses opens up new perspectives on the debate about biotechnology.
Further reading
particularly projects from the 1960s and 1970s by studios such as Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Ant Farm, Haus-Rucker-Co, and Walter Pichler
https://www.bldgblog.com/
Ideas
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Explore, in a tentative way, how to endure and embody the extreme cruelty present in human behavior by creating stuffed animals that represent these harsh acts.
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Consider making a self-designed casual T-shirt that depicts human cruelty with a touch of humor, perhaps beginning with themes drawn from working culture.