Speculative Design #1
- Alice
- Jul 22, 2021
- 4 min read
Speculative design and beyond
What are the key features of Speculative design?
How does it differ from the design frameworks you’ve encountered on the Design programme so far?
Refer to the lecture slideshow, any notes you have taken this week, as well as secondary research to support your ideas.
Speculative design is a design approach that uses an open set of tools and methods to come up with a concept. This allows more discussion to be created amongst designers - whether this concept is crucial or not. Tran from Invisionapp states that it is a “process of addressing big societal issues with design processes and systems”. Designers have the responsibility to create and solve the problem in which speculative design allows bigger problems within the society to have a lead for the solution.
Speculative design interacts with other design principles constantly, therefore, uses different methods, tools and approaches that are accessible at any time. The genres and the concepts could be based on fictional narratives as well as media that is thought to be suitable at any given moment (reading).
Through the lecture during DES231: The Future of Work and Play course as well as the readings that we - the students - were provided, I came up with my own definition of speculative design based on my personal understanding. Speculative design is a concept of a solution or part of a solution that will generate discussions between designers to lead them to a better, less complex path to the solution. The process of speculative design only suggests the idea and provides a “path” and it depends on us, as the designers, to whether follow or look for different solutions.
Beyond Speculative Design
What are the strengths/limitations of this mode of design?
Use the notes taken during your reading group discussion and/or the prompts above to summarise your key takeaways from today’s reading group.
The strengths of this type of design approach would be that it allows designers to create new, unthinkable ideas to provide multiple leads and perspectives for a given problem. Many solutions to a certain problem, the better the outcome will be. Hence giving multiple solutions will allow better and stronger solutions to the problem and even be developed to better ideas.
However, this leads to the limitation of this approach as giving multiple solutions would cause a harder time to decide on the right solution and focus on the main problem. Making a decision is usually the hardest thing to do in any type of career in my opinion and personally, I find it difficult to make the decision myself - afraid of the consequences of the decision that I had made. The speculative design suggests the different concepts for a potential solution but not all suggested solutions will be the rightful ones.
Another limitation to speculative design is that it only suggests the idea and the concept not necessarily thinking of the consequences and the outcomes behind it. It gives a variety of views of a certain problem and the potential of how it could be solved but some examples that I have viewed are ridiculous.
Case study 1: ‘Ecosystem of Excess’
Select what you found to be the most successful example of speculative design from the cases you discussed in class today.
What was the overall goal of the design?
The case study that I will discuss is a project that was part of the reading during class time. The Ecosystem of Excess project brings in the new founding of bacteria that can metabolise plastic. The idea of this is to create a complex post-human life form in the sea that will deal with the trash created by humans.
Pinar Yolda, the creator of this idea, was inspired by the excessive consumption of plastic during her life in the United States. Many of her works are based on the impact of humans on the environment. From her background in the science industry, she was able to develop a speculative design solution to the waste problem in the United States as well as globally.
Why did you find it a more successful example of speculative design than the other cases your group analysed?
How did it better achieve its goal?
Other than the project that I have discussed, we were provided three other projects in the class time reading. The reason why the example that I have chosen shows a more successful speculative approach would be that it looks more into the potential future that humans have and a more reasonable solution that we could consider and discuss. One other project that we were provided was the Pink Chicken project where it proposes the newly invented biotechnology to genetically modify chickens to turn “pink”. The starting point of this project is tolerable however, it does not consider the common sense and the better potential that the invention could have. There could be many more possibilities than the new biotechnology invention could bring up but personally did not feel the importance of the proposed project. The project that I decided to discuss shows better potential for us - the designers - to discuss the idea and the possibility that the proposed project could have which is the reason why the Ecosystem of Excess project successfully demonstrates as an example of speculative design.
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