BEPULJANG Blog
What is Speculative DesignPart 7

Whose Future Is It?

What if a dystopia in the gallery is already someone's reality? A look at the criticisms aimed at speculative design, and at who the subject of the "preferred future" really is.

#Speculative Design#Design Criticism#Decolonial#Ethics

The previous piece left a question: how critical can speculation be when there is a client? In fact, this question doesn’t apply only to government-commissioned work. It connects to the criticism that the field of speculative design as a whole has steadily received. In this piece, I’ll look at those criticisms.

This isn’t simply here for balance. In the first piece of this series, I introduced speculative design as “design that proposes moving toward the preferred future,” and if it can’t get through these criticisms, the word “preferred” may ring hollow.

A Dystopia That Has Already Arrived

The sharpest criticism can be found in the writing of Luiza Prado de O. Martins and Pedro Oliveira. Their 2014 essay “Questioning the ‘critical’ in speculative and critical design” and its expanded version, “Futuristic Gizmos, Conservative Ideals,” are the best-known examples.

The core of it is this: many of the “dystopian” futures exhibited at places like MoMA and the V&A are unfamiliar only to the designers who made them, and resemble conditions that people somewhere in the world are already living through. One example they cite is Dunne & Raby’s Republic of Salivation, which imagines a future where the government rations food. They point out that the designers seem unaware that this is already a reality in many countries.

Foragers, which we looked at earlier, can be seen again in the same light. People finding their own food in a world short of it were exhibited as an imagined future. But for some people, food shortage isn’t a scenario still to come; it’s life now. Then whose shock is it that the exhibition delivers? Is what it warns about the future of humanity, or the fear of certain people that they might lose the life they enjoy now? Critics point out that the field ultimately remains stuck in a fear of losing First World privilege.

A Message in a Bottle

The second criticism is about reach. Speculative design says it wants to spark debate across society, but in practice the people who see the work are often museumgoers, people at design schools, and other designers.

Bruce and Stephanie Tharp compare this to a “message in a bottle.” It’s been sent off, but there’s no knowing who will read it, and the form itself provides no way to connect with wider society. In 2014, Matt Kiem asked which groups critical designers were actually in conversation with, and went so far as to say that perhaps the most radical thing they could do was simply to stop.

This is also a weakness shared across the design field. UX design is wary of design that never meets its users, yet the moment the future is involved, that principle is easily set aside, on the grounds that future users don’t exist yet. But some of the people who will live in that future are already here, now.

Did the Question Become an Answer?

The third criticism concerns effect. As we saw in the piece on design fiction, the language of design fiction flowed into ads from Corning and Amazon. The grammar of imagining the near future lost its critical edge and became the marketing language of tech companies.

The Subject of Preference

Bring the three criticisms together, and they arrive at a single question: in the “preferred future,” who is doing the preferring?

As we saw in the third piece of this series, preference is a value judgment. So the claim that one future is “better” always carries within it the question of who it’s better for. In the first piece, I introduced speculative design as “design that takes society and the age as a whole as its design object,” and that expression, too, needs a second look. As an ambition it has meaning, but it can easily slide into calling a few people’s tastes by the name of society. It’s also worth remembering that history’s terrible social engineering projects mostly put forward their own “better future.”

That doesn’t mean every future is equally good. What these criticisms ask for is not silence but something closer to process: making visible, within the work, who drew that future, who was left out, and who pays its costs. In other words, just as problem-solving design asks “Who is the user?”, design that imagines futures must ask “Whose future is this?”

In the next piece, building on this question, I’d like to talk about something a little more practical: how an ordinary product team, with neither a museum nor a government commission, might use this method.

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