It’s exciting that designers are trying on the latest Speculative design buzz to look beyond what is happening in their practices, but what is Speculative design as applied to design practice?
Speculative design has appeared in the main stream, but what is it and why is it taking the interest of designers?
In early 2018, I conducted research to discover how designers can find their own ethics. This led to a series of experiments which aim to evolve our understanding of design ethics using Speculative design.
What is Speculative Design?
Speculative design is what it sounds like–speculating about what the future might look like, creating scenarios which help project into the future, with the intent to curb our current decision-making and behaviours. Kind of like a threat to humanity: this might happen, if...
It sounds great but as far as I’m aware, it was not intended to become a ubiquitous vehicle for future making for organisations and governments. It was originally conceived by Dunne and Raby in 2013 in their book ‘Speculative Everything’ as a way to integrate art with design practice to conceive of the differences between the plausible, possible, probable and preferable directions we as a humanity should or could head in.
The majority of the examples in Dunne and Raby’s book originate in the arts: the artists intent often to leverage the possibility of absurdity in order to think differently.
An example is captured below in an image by Walter Pichler and helps to articulate this point. ‘TV Helmet’, demonstrates Speculative design theory by illustrating the artists intent to provoke absurdity whilst bordering on the possible.
‘We were left wondering how this spirit could be reintroduced to contemporary design and how design’s boundaries could be extended beyond the strictly commercial to embrace the extreme, the imaginative, and the inspiring’ (Dunne and Raby, 2013).
If we took Pichler’s TV Helmet and thought about how this radical form of art could be applied to design practice, what would we say?
Some context
The radical design of the 1970’s halted during the 1980’s, when design became hyper-commercialised, swallowing up any potential design had of exploring alternate possibilities. Victor Papanek who was on point in the 1970’s had become boring, and any potential outside designs new role to generate wealth were marginalised.
Social experimentation subsided with the collapse of the Berlin wall, and with it the possibility for design to try to align itself with social or political movements beyond capitalism.
The financial crash of 2008 triggered alternate ways to conceive of alternate realities, and this helped design, and society more generally to question the way things were. Without an alternative to capitalism, there began a search for something new, different and more resilient.
It is good that design has become commercially ubiquitous in one sense, but a down side is that it has affected designer’s ability to explore and experiment outside of organisational design practice.
Dunne and Raby argue for a pluralism in design, of ideology and values, or design about ideas, free from market pressures.
I feel strongly about this as a designer, feeling reasonably frustrated with much of the repetition I see in design process and methodologies. I love that the double diamond has made design process explainable and transparent, but I don’t love that it has become the assumed form of design practice and problem solving more generally.
This potential to use the language of design to pose questions, provoke, and inspire is Speculative design’s defining feature and an opportunity for designers to push the problem into a freer domain where we can think and design the design approach with more confidence, creativity and intent.
‘We are not talking about a space for experimenting with how things are now, making them better or different, but about other possibilities altogether. We are more interested in designing for how things could be. Conceptual design provides a space for doing this. It deals, by definition, with unreality. Conceptual designs are not conceptual because they haven’t yet been realised or are waiting to be realized but out of choice. They celebrate their unreality and take full advantage of being made from ideas.’ (Dunne and Raby, 2013).
My personal view is that we need to go into reality in order to go out of it. We need to begin by thinking objectively about the design processes and methodologies we use and reconceive of ways to make these more bespoke and future-defining. Thinking about ‘other possibilities all together’ sounds like an immense task, particularly at work (for those of us who have clients to convince!) but dismissing it as too hard isn’t the right way to go either.
Applying Speculative Design to Design Ethics
The research I conducted aimed to discover how designers can find their own ethics. I am super passionate about design ethics, and wanted to shake up my practice to explore new ways to think about discovering this topic.
This led to a series of experiments which aim to evolve our understanding of design ethics using Speculative design. This was an experiment using experiments to see what we can learn about design ethics using Speculative design.
The experiments I am creating in 2019 aim to help design become more ethical by allowing analysis into the responses of designers of different levels of experience and across different industries and see what (if any) patterns emerge and sharing this back with the community.
The Research
I talked to 30+ designers at different stages of their careers across corporate, government, not-for-profit, those who had studied academically and those who hadn’t. I was fortunate enough to speak to luminaries in the field, as well as newbies, across many different cultures. I held meet-up’s, had one-on-one chats, and created prototypes to test my growing hypotheses.
Speculative Ethics Experiments
Before designers can bring ethics into their practices, they need to identify where their ethical boundaries lie. All designers have a very personal set of values, and through my research, I aim to help shape these values into meaningful actions.
Experiment 1: The first experiment is an ethical engagement designed to prompt designers to discover their own ethics through Speculative Scenarios.
Experiment 2: To be announced.
Experiment 3: To be announced.
Speculative design has been used as a vehicle to help designers think about ethics differently. The experiments aim to help designers think about the potential outcomes of our future which could occur without design ethics.
I am using Speculative design to gain a data led sense of what ethics is for designers and more importantly tools to help them apply an ethical lens to their work and life.
By participating we’ll share our findings with you as soon as we analyse and disseminate them. You’ll be the first to hear about what we find! So, try it and see what you think. What does your ethical compass tell you?
Try the Speculative Ethics Experiment v1.0
DesignEthics.com.au | An Experimental Platform for gathering perspectives on what Ethics means for Design practitioners using Speculative Design.
