Speculative everything

Speculative everything : design, fiction, and social dreaming
Dunne, Anthony
2013
Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press.   224 p.
Resumen : You’d be hard-pressed to find a more influential pair of practitioners working within the ‘critical design’ space than Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and rightly so, given they coined the term almost two decades ago. In recent years the duo have created esoteric depictions of future political and spatial ecologies in the UK, coping mechanisms for the (quite possible) over-populated and famished years ahead, and dreamlike visions of the role robots might eventually play in everyday life. To Dunne and Raby, design is not the provision of services to clients or kowtowing to market demands.
Rather, it can be a platform for speculation, a means of crafting ”fictional worlds, cautionary tales” and “what if scenarios” to stoke our collective imagination
It is against this backdrop of ‘what ifs’ that Dunne and Raby have encapsulated their motivations and career arc into Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, a book that boldly hypothesizes new roles that design might play in the 21st century. Citing the influence of radical architecture studios like Archigram and Superstudio in the 1960s and 70s and the tension of the “hyper-commercialized” 80s that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, the introduction concludes with a call for much-needed pluralism in design—“not of style but of ideology and values.”
The book begins with a stocktaking of the litany of terms relevant to more ‘conceptual’ design: design fiction, radical design, adversarial design, etc., which are considered as both approaches within and responses to the constraints of specific disciplines. An ensuing survey includes the axonometric drawings underpinning Peter Eisenman’s series of houses, Husssein Chalayan’s metamorphic catwalk apparel, and an ‘experimental restaurant’ by Martí Guixé neatly demonstrates the breadth of practices and mediums that are up for reconsideration once design is approached as tool for cultural critique. The authors proceed to put critique itself under the microscope, and muse on ‘tone’ while weighing the benefits of dystopian thinking versus more optimistic scenario crafting within critical design. Quite usefully, Dunne and Raby conclude that open-ended provocations are much more effective than prescriptive ones. “By generating alternatives,” they write, designers “can help people construct compasses rather than maps for navigating new sets of values.”
Speculative Everything very much exemplifies the ‘compasses not maps’ methodology espoused by Dunne and Raby. It should be consumed voraciously as the exhaustive list of design precedents (from synthetic biology to experimental industrial design), films, and supporting scholarship it succinctly frames is so sprawling and multidisciplinary that it is hard to imagine a reader not coming away from the book with weeks of research leads to follow-up on. A minor complaint: the duo seem a bit reticent to foreground their own practice and the overviews of their Designs for an Overpopulated Planet (2010) and United Micro Kingdoms (2013) feel cursory.
These case studies comprise the final fifth of the book and given the immaculate buildup, considerably more detail would have been quite welcome. Regardless, Speculative Everything is one of those books that immediately vaults to ‘essential’ status for any design educator as it effectively peels back the veneer and reveals the inner (pedagogical) workings of RCA’s esteemed Design Interactions program. Furthermore, as a rather affordable alternative, it also has the potential to radically expand the ‘plausible’ futures of any 21 or 22 year old student (or any practitioner at a formative moment in their career) fortunate enough to delve into it.
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