Design That Makes Questions Instead of Answers
Where did speculative design come from? Following critical design from the 1990s and Dunne & Raby's A/B list, this piece looks at why designers began to doubt the premise that design is problem solving.
In the previous piece, I introduced speculative design as “design that takes society and the age as a whole as its object, and imagines and proposes a better path.” But the concept didn’t start out with such grand ambitions. At its origin was a much pricklier question: is solving problems really all design has to do?
For designers, problem solving is close to an identity. We find friction, analyze its causes, and propose a better form. I’ve written about UX design from that perspective myself, in pieces outside this series. Yet this frame holds a premise that’s easy to miss: the belief that the problem has already been correctly defined, and that the world as it stands has what it takes to accept the solution.
The Designers Who Doubted Electronics
Among those who took this premise head-on were Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, in Britain. They had been developing the notion of “critical design” since the mid-1990s, and in his 1999 book Hertzian Tales, Dunne treated electronic products as objects of aesthetic experience and critique.
“Critical” here doesn’t mean finding fault. It’s closer to bringing to light the ways of life and values a product quietly assumes, so that we think about them again. The electronics we use don’t stop at performing functions; they also carry ideas about how we ought to live.
Trace the roots further back and you reach the radical design and anti-design of 1970s Italy. Ettore Sottsass’s 1973 work The Planet as a Festival is often cited as an early attempt. It showed that picturing another world, rather than an object that could be made right away, is also something design can do.
A/B: Two Lists
The most concise summary of this thinking is Dunne and Raby’s list, “A/B.” The preface to their 2013 book Speculative Everything says the book grew out of it. The format sets familiar design on the left, under A, beside the design they propose on the right, under B.
| A | B |
|---|---|
| Affirmative | Critical |
| Problem solving | Problem finding |
| Provides answers | Asks questions |
| Design for production | Design for debate |
| Makes us buy | Makes us think |
A word of caution when reading this table. It’s easy to take it as a claim that B is right and A is wrong, but the list works more like a tool for widening the range of what design can be through comparison. The world still needs door handles that work well, and that job belongs to A. It’s only when we assume A is all design can do that certain questions become impossible to raise.
From Critique to Speculation
So how do critical design and speculative design differ? The boundary isn’t clean, and researchers draw it a little differently. Speculative design is often described as a branch of critical design, one focused on proposals about the future.
The perspectives are similar, but the difference can be understood as one of tense. Critical design asks, “What world does this object assume right now?” while speculative design asks, “What if the world were different?” That is why the short phrase “what if” has become the grammar of this work.
Dunne and Raby are clear that this “speculation” is different from “prediction.” Getting it right isn’t the goal. Instead, they put multiple possibilities in front of us to prompt debate about which futures we want and don’t want, and in doing so seek to discuss how reality isn’t fixed but can be changed, what a desirable future is, and what could be improved to meet it.
The Use of Uselessness
Seen this way, it makes sense that the output of speculative design looks so useless. Unlike the common idea of design, you can’t buy it, it isn’t mass-produced, and it’s sometimes downright unpleasant. Its boundary with art is also blurry, which has drawn steady criticism that it can’t really be called design at all.
But this view comes from an incomplete understanding of how the concept and essence of design have been expanding. The essence of design has steadily moved beyond “selling” toward the conceptual and speculative. What hasn’t changed through all of this is only that it is “goal-oriented”: that it “plans environments and behavior and brings about change.”
In the end, a thing that has to sell can hardly go beyond what people already want. So only by stepping outside the market can we raise the question of what people ought to want, and only then does design turn from a tool for solving problems into a tool for rewriting them. In other words, this work follows design’s very nature, which puts the planning and improvement of environments and behavior first, and leaves even “selling” behind when it doesn’t serve the goal.
In the next piece, building on this understanding, I’ll take another look at the “futures cone” I briefly introduced earlier.
References
- Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales (1999)
- Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything (MIT Press, 2013)