Looking to the Future

In this week's edition of our Contemporary Design Culture class we had a talk about Speculative Design. Don't worry I had no clue what Speculative Design was about either when I first heard it as well. The definition that we were given was speculative design is how we use design to figure out how things could be. However speculative design is more than problem-solving, it is dreaming, imagining and forging the future we would like to see. What I understand from the lecture that we received is that speculative design forges the future and it looks at the bigger picture instead of the everyday problems people have to face now. An example of this would be trying to change our habits that directly affects climate change instead of trying to lower the price of oil, petrol or diesel. One thing to keep in mind when thinking about speculative design is that it is talking about a probable future and sometimes a probable future isn't the best way forward. Speculative design is also about idealism more so than it would be about realism. Two people who understand that statement would be Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. They have made an infographic which explains the differences between a plausible, a preferable, a possible and a probable future. The way I understand it is a possible future is a science fiction type future one that has flying cars and laser guns, a plausible future is one that is under the realm that society would accept, a probable future is one that would happen if everything about society that is bad for example high consumption of fossil fuels, high consumerism level and overpopulation stays the same and finally a preferable future is one that we as designers have the most control over as we have the ability to change it.

After the lecture we got into three groups and wrote down a bunch of "What if?" questions for example "what if religion didn't exist?", "what if we were the sims?" etc. We then got into smaller groups based on the question that we liked the most from all of the ”What if?" questions. I chose "What if we knew the date of our death but not the time?" We ended up speculating that people would just know when they would die as it would be at the back of their mind this way you could tell people if you wanted to. We thought that the government would probably would want to make money off of the death date and they would tell people that they could extend it but we dismissed this once we decided that the death date would be known by only the person. We also played around with the idea that people with the same death date would become 'Death Buddies' it went down well when we told the class later on. I found this exercise a good way to introduce the way of thinking like a speculative designer would. We had to think of every little scenario or else the world would seem fake which is normal for a speculative designer.