Speculative Design: Designing the Preferred Future
More than forecasting the future, speculative design proposes a better path for society as a whole. A look at the concept — and the design direction Bepuljang pursues.
There is a concept called Speculative Design. “Design” is generally thought to have begun as craft — and from the craftsman’s idea of adding art to a manufactured good, it gradually branched into thinking about art within the very process of making that good. As its meaning expanded to mean planning and orchestrating a process around its purpose and efficiency, the word “speculation” — meaning conjecture, a looking-ahead — was attached to it.
In other words, it means design that predicts and envisions the future. And in truth, that is natural to the very idea of “design.” Design has always predicted the users and use-environment of its object and offered a form optimized for the purpose at hand. Taken at face value, all design already contains prediction and foresight.
That is exactly why I’m curious about the background against which this particular term arose, and what distinctive concept it is meant to describe. Speculative design is characterized by taking a more social and macroscopic view — one that goes beyond mere prediction within the process of some design object.
Put differently: where earlier design deliberated over a specific object such as a product, a service, or a company, and — through its anticipatory reading of that object’s future — proposed the optimal form for a goal, speculative design takes society and the age as a whole as its design object, and foresees, within the technology and environment given to us, a better path for our society to move toward.
The Cone of Possibility, often discussed in speculative design, is a good diagram for illustrating this visually. Taking the whole range of futures that could arise from our present, it sorts them by likelihood into probable, plausible, and possible futures — and shows that among these, we can propose moving toward a preferred future.
There has long been a related field called conceptual design, which similarly presents objects of the imagination. But what sets speculative design apart is this: where conceptual design ultimately keeps its emphasis on reality and stops at presenting the usability of new products and services in the near future (Probable), speculative design has a leading edge — it presents and guides a vision of the future and the path we ought to take (Preferred). That is, its key distinction is that it designs not the future as a result of the present, but an improved future that we can reach through change.
We usually survey the future as a dark, forbidding dystopia. This is because we are wired to feel hardship more acutely and to react more strongly to negative stimuli (Prospect Theory). But design has always overcome that human nature, finding the most optimal outcome within given conditions and goals.
Speculative design, too, finds its meaning in looking coldly at the conditions we have and, within them, seeking the path society should take and the future that would be most preferred. And this is exactly the design direction that “Bepuljang” pursues — to find, in the utopia given to us, its first thread. The single most ideal future.