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Notes and highlights for Speculative Everything:


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futurology,

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Platform 3, Durrell Bishop, Onkar Kular, Ron Arad, and Hilary French;

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Dreams are powerful. They are repositories of our desire. They animate the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they can also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.'

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are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could be-speculative design.

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What we are interested in, though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, ones people do not want.

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This space lies somewhere between reality and the impossible and to operate in it effectively, as a designer, requires new design roles, contexts, and methods.

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also ideas-fictional fictional worlds, cautionary tales, what-if scenarios, thought experiments, counterfactuals, reductio ad absurdum experiments, prefigurative futures, and so on.

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what if scenario. What if everyone was required to ride a bike?

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the futurologist Stuart Candy

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Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible4 sets out three classes of impossibility,

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In the scenarios we develop we believe, first, they should be scientifically possible, and second, there should be a path from where we are today to where we are in the scenario. A believable series of events that led to the new situation is necessary, even if entirely fictional.

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We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and, although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening. And equally, factors that may lead to undesirable futures can be spotted early on and addressed or at least limited.

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us. We were left wondering how this spirit could be reintroduced to contemporary design and how design's boundaries could be extended beyond the strictly commercial to embrace the extreme, the imaginative, and the inspiring.

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Walter Pichler, TV Helmet (Portable Living Room), 1967.

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It has a short but rich history and it is a place where many interconnected and not very well understood forms of design happen-speculative design,' critical design ,2 design fiction ,3 design futures ,4 antidesign, radical design, interrogative design ,6 design for debate, adversarial design,6 discursive design,' futurescaping,8 and some design art.

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explore some of these topics

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We are not talking about a space for experimenting with how things are now, making them better or different, but about other possibilities altogether.

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We are more interested in designing for how things could be.

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Patrick Stevenson Keating's The Quantum Parallelograph (2011) is a public engagement prop exploring ideas about quantum physics and multiverses by finding and printing out online information from a user's "parallel life."

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A more concrete example is MTKS-3/The Meta-territorial Kitchen System-3 (2003) by Marti Guixe.

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At the other end of the spectrum conceptual design means a parallel space of speculation that uses hypothetical or, more accurately, fictional products to explore possible technological futures.11 Industrial and product design usually operate at this end. This is the end we are interested in.

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Hussein Chayalan is an exception. His shows are beautifully crafted vignettes that make use of ingenious objects and novel technologies; his "airplane dress" is one of our favorites. Companies such as Comme des

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How about my suit idea...fits right in here really.

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Garcon, A-POC, and Martin Margiella make highly conceptual but wearable clothes that play with ideas of materiality and tailoring, social conventions and expectations, and aesthetics.

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Dutch design group Droog. It

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William Morris who was the first to create critical design objects

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issues. Bey's Slow Car (2007), a motorized office chair and desk enclosure is designed to question our use of time spent in cars in highly congested cities.

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innovative, concept cars rarely deal with the social and cultural implications of transportation systems and consistently focus on the car as an object. One recent exception, maybe not intentionally so, is Ora-'ito's Evo Mobil (2010) for Citroen, an imaginary evolution of early Citroens

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such as the Traction Avant into a futuristic "personal mobility system," essentially a sedan chair-one of two designs intended to promote new thinking in the car industry about possible new directions and values.

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The relationship between reality and unreality is particularly interesting in architecture because many buildings are designed to be built but remain on paper due to economic or political reasons. House VI is unusual because it was intentionally an uncompromising piece of architectural art someone could live in, just about. It was as though the owner lived inside an idea rather than a building.

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Although it is possible to buy a "conceptual" skirt from Comme des Garcons or A-POC, it is not possible to buy a conceptual phone, at least not since the failed but brave efforts of Enorme in the 1980s or Daniel Weil's batch-produced highly conceptual radios also from the 1980s. With the exception of farsighted entrepreneur designers such as Naoto Fukasawa and his +/-0 line of products, Maywa Denki's Otamatone,

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Sam Hecht/Industrial Facility's everyday objects, and Hulger's low-energy Plumen Light Bulb, product design remains closely aligned with market expectation and is one of the few areas in which conceptual and commercial approaches really do not mix.

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but perhaps they could mix?

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Since the new millennium there has been a significant increase in experimentation at the boundaries of interaction design and media art sometimes referred to as device art18 but it is usually focused on aesthetic, communicative, and functional possibilities for new media rather than visions for how life could be, and mainly takes the form of digital craft rather than future speculations.19

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Ryota Kuwakubo

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Philips Design Probes, Microbial Home, 2011.

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The technology industry does have its own tradition of conceptual design in the form of Vision of the Future video scenarios setting out future directions or promoting new corporate values but

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they are often very limited in their scope and vision. They usually feature perfect worlds for perfect people interacting perfectly with perfect technologies.

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Their Microbial Home (2011) is a proposal for integrating domestic activities such as cooking, energy usage, human waste management, food preparation, and storage, as well as lighting into one sustainable ecosystem in which each function's output is another's input.

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Universities and art schools could become platforms for experimentation, speculation, and the reimagining of everyday life.

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"critical design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life."

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For many years the term slipped into the background but recently it has resurfaced as a part of growing discourse in design research ,3 exhibitions 4 and even articles in the mainstream press .6 This is good but the danger is it becomes a design label rather than an activity, a style rather than an approach.

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critical design

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CRITIQUE/CRITICAL THINKING/CRITICAL THEORY/CRITICISM Critique is not necessarily negative; it can also be a gentle refusal, a turning away from what exists, a longing, wishful thinking, a desire, and even a dream. Critical designs are testimonials to what could be, but at the same time, they offer alternatives that highlight weaknesses within existing normality.

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It is about thinking through design rather than through words and using the language and structure of design to engage people. It is an expression or manifestation of our skeptical fascination with technology, a way of unpicking the different hopes, fears, promises, delusions, and nightmares of technological development and change, especially how scientific discoveries move from the laboratory into everyday life through the marketplace.

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All good critical design offers an alternative to how things are. It is the gap between reality as we know it and the different idea of reality referred to in the critical design proposal that creates the space for discussion.

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good word

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Want to Replace the Existing Normal?, a project we did with designer Michael Anastassiades in 2007-2008, we designed a collection of electronic products that intentionally embodied values at odds with those we would expect from products today. The statistical clock searches newsfeeds for fatalities and organizes them by form of transport in a database. The owner sets the channel to car, train, plane, for instance, and once the device detects an event, it speaks out the numbers in sequence, one, two, three....

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possible future becomes real. If it did not sell it would be sent back, becoming a rejected reality. In a consumer society, the moment we part with our money is the moment a little bit of reality is created.

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Bernd Hopfengaertner's Belief Systems (2009).

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Hopfengaertner asks what would happen if one of the tech industry's many dreams comes true, if all the research being done by separate companies into making humans machine readable were to combine and move from laboratory to everyday life: combined algorithms and camera systems that can read emotions from faces, gait, and demeanor; neurotechnologies that cannot exactly read minds but can make a good guess at what people are thinking;

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Bernd Hopfengaertner, Belief Systems, 2009. Humor is a very important but often misused element in this kind of design. Satire is the goal but often only parody and pastiche are achieved. These reduce the effectiveness of the design in a number of ways.

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The viewer should experience a dilemma: is it serious or not? Real or not? For a critical design to be successful viewers need to make up their own mind.

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good point. Keep in mind for thesis.

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are The Yes Men (Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) who use satire,

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my heroes

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Critical design might borrow heavily from art's methods and approaches but that is it. We expect art to be shocking and extreme. Critical design needs to be closer to the everyday; that's where its power to disturb lies. A critical design should be demanding, challenging, and if it is going to raise awareness, do so for issues that are not already well known.

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Safe ideas will not linger in people's minds or challenge prevailing views but if it is too weird, it will be dismissed as art, and if too normal, it will be effortlessly assimilated. If it is labeled as art it is easier to deal with but if it remains design, it is more disturbing; it suggests that the everyday life as we know it could be different, that things could change.

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That is why for us, critical designs need to be made physical. Their physical presence can locate them in our world whereas their meaning, embodied values, beliefs, ethics, dreams, hopes, and fears belong somewhere else.

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Jaemin Paik, When We All Live to 750, 2012.

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love it! I had thought how would retirement work? Sustainable?

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Frederick Pohl once remarked, a good writer does not think up only the automobile but also the traffic jam.

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There is a separation between what we believe ought to be and how we actually behave when we want to use a biotech service or product. Usually when we discuss big issues we do so as citizens, yet it is as consumers that we help reality take shape. It

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Yes this is because you we purchase a product it's for me the most important person in the world. No-one considers anything but themselves.

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And these projects might prepare people for what is to come by unintentionally paving the way for a greater acceptance of biotechnology through desensitization. Despite this, however, we feel the benefits of this approach far outweigh the negatives.

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In the United Kingdom it even has its own category, SciArt.

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SciArt is sometimes criticized as bad science and bad art,

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For many funding organizations, and even artists and scientists, the ideal model for art and science is the collaborative project in which an artist and scientist work together to develop a new piece of work. This is an almost utopian dream of art-science collaboration, but in our view, one or the other is usually driving the project.

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Mathieu Lehanneur and David Edwards, Andrea, 2009.

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the project demonstrates that it is not always necessary to be "real" to be valuable.

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The project is about using design to ask questions rather than providing answers or solving problems.

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yes!

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Would vegetarians eat it because animals would no longer need to be slaughtered or to suffer? Could we eat lab-grown human meat, from a famous pop star perhaps, and would it be for love or malice?

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There are no solutions in these projects or even answers, just questions, thoughts, ideas, and possibilities, all expressed through the language of design. They

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Once we move away from the present, from how things are now, we enter this realm of possible worlds. We

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literal world creation; and even in science there are many rich strands of discourse around fictionalism, useful fictions, model organisms, and multiverses.4

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multiverse...science and theories of a multiverse.

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Probably the purest form of fictional world is the utopia (and its opposite, the dystopia).

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i do rather like distopian future films

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sci-fi critique termed critical science fiction in which dystopias are understood in relation to critical theory and the philosophy of science."

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sci-fi theorist Darko Suvin who uses the term cognitive estrangement,

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Philip K.Dick is the master of this. In his novels everything is marketized and monetized. They are set in twisted utopias where all are free to live as they please but they are trapped within the options available through the market.

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correcto mundo...blade runner

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Or The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M.Kornbluth, which is set in a society where the highest form of existence is to be an advertising man and crimes against consumption are possible.

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It can be found in film, too: Idiocracy (2006) and WALL-E (2008) are both set in worlds suffering from social decay and cultural dumbing down. The most recent example is Black Mirror (2012), a satirical miniseries for Chanel Four television in the United Kingdom.

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seen all of this and love it!

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Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror, 2012, production still. Photograph by Giles Keyte.

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Literature makes us work so much harder because readers need to construct everything about the fictional world in their imagination. As designers, maybe we are somewhere in between; we provide some visual clues but the viewer still has to imagine the world the designs belong to and its politics, social relations, and ideology.

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Red Plenty (2010) Francis Spufford

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as The World, Who Wants it? by architect Ben Nicholson and The Post - spectacular Economy by design critic Justin McGuirk.13 Both are stories of ideas exploring the consequences for design of major global, political, and economic changes-Nicholson's

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We are interested in working the other way around-starting with designs that the viewer can use to imagine the kind of society that would have produced them, its values, beliefs, and ideologies. In After Man-A Zoology of the Future

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thes lierary examples do not explore how these future shifts may manifest themselves in everyday life

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Oryx and Crake is very close to how a speculative design project might be constructed. All her inventions are based on actual research that she then extrapolates into imaginary but not too far-fetched commercial products.

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One way this might be possible is to treat design speculations not as narratives or coherent "worlds" but as thought experiments-constructions,

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reductio ad absurdum,

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Thomas Thwaites's The Toaster Project (2009) is a good example.

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James Chambers's Attenborough Design Group (2010)

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Sascha PohfIepp,

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cozy catastrophes by British author Brian Aldiss.

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But we are designers not writers. We want to build things that create similar levels of reflection and pleasure but use the language

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of design. How can we do this? What happens when speculations move from behind the screen or from the pages of a book to coexist in the same space as the viewer?

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Designers today are expert fictioneers in denial.

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"unsettle the present rather than predict the future. ,17

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MoMA curator Paola Antonelli suggests, we might see the beginnings of a theoretical form of design dedicated to thinking, reflecting, inspiring, and providing new perspectives on some of the challenges facing us.18

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There is a skill and craft to positioning a speculative design, "what the reader or viewer does is to project meanings into the work of art, not any meanings but choices from a family of meanings that the work suggests."'

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The closest relatives we can think of are historical everyday artifacts in museum collections that prompt us to imagine what life must have been like in those societies.

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this could be a great sourc eof inspiration... think museum of natural history.

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into believing something is real is cheating. We prefer viewers to willingly suspend their disbelief and to enjoy shifting their imagination into a new, unfamiliar, and playful space.

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Plant Fiction (2010) by the design collective Troika,

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Inconsistency is the issue; there has to be internal consistency within the world the prop belongs to.

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And in Sputniko's Menstruation Machine (2010) the

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Tommaso Lanza, Shredders, 2009,

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Speculative design overlaps with several other emerging design approaches but design fiction is probably the closest, and the terms are often used interchangeably.

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also call design fiction but dunne and raby make a distinction

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Bruce Sterling defines design fiction as "the deliberate use of diegetic13 prototypes to suspend disbelief about change ,,,14 which could also describe a precursor of design fiction sometimes referred to as "artifacts from the future."

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further clarfication of design fiction

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Inevitably, design fiction suffers from some of the issues associated with film props mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, namely, a dependence on

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referencing the already known.

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We are more interested in using fictional designs to suggest things can be very different indeed, consequently our fictions are glitchy, strange, disruptive, and hint at other places, times, and values.

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we prefer the term speculative design over design fiction.

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fictional design we are interested in is that they are rarely critical of technological progress and border on celebration rather than questioning.

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is rarely critical that is one difference from speculative disign

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And how, in a design, can you simultaneously capture the real and not - real?

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Nonobjects (2010) of Branko Lukic

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Superflux does beautifully in its Song of the Machine (2011) project. The video shows the world seen through a prosthetic device for people with reduced vision.

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Superflux (Anab Jain and Jon Arden), Song of the Machine, The Film, 2011.

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Yuichi Yokoyama, from his comic New Engineering (New York: Picture Box, 2007). Image courtesy of Picture Box.

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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Sascha Pohflepp, Growth Assem bl y, 2009. Illustrations by Sion Ap Tomos.

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Norman Bel Geddes, Airliner No. 4, Deck 5, 1929. Image

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Josef Schulz's Formen series (2001-2008) of photographs is similar but more abstract. His original photographs of existing industrial and commercial structures and infrastructure are slightly modified to heighten their abstract nature.

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Filip Dujardin, Untitled from the series Fictions, 2007.

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Josef Schulz, Form No.14, 2001-2008, from Formen series.

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PostlerFerguson, Wooden Giants, 2010.

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El Ultimo Grito, "Industry," 2011, from the series Imaginary Architectures.

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Joey Ruiter, Moto Undone, 2011.

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By using characters in scenario design we ask viewers to become voyeurs, glimpsing the world of the character and comparing it to their own. Using humans in this way is not so unusual in fine art: Miwa Yanagai and her Elevator Girls, Mariko Mori's sci-fi scenes, Cindy Sherman's modifications to herself, and less well-known, Juha Arvid Helinen's striking Shadow People

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very similar n a way to what I've done with the suit. perhaps should use live model?

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Mariko Mori, Miko No Inori, 1996.

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With Menstruation Machine: Takashi's Take (2010) designer Sputniko (aka Hiromi Ozaki)

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sputniko is now at MIT. She is doing some interesting things combining science and design. I believe she heads up a design fiction program at MIT.

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Sputniko, Menstruation Machine: Takashi's Take, 2010.

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Lucas's THX 1138 (1971). It is the archetypal future space or nonplace.

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Viewers have different expectations for design than they do for film. Because of this, we believe it is more interesting to explore new aesthetic possibilities for speculative objects that signal their ambiguous status as simultaneously real and unreal.

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The deadpan photography of Lars Tunbjork's Alien at the Office' (2004)

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When we see a strange shoe or ritualistic object we wonder what kind of society must have produced it, how it was structured, what values, beliefs, and dreams motivated it, if it was wealthy or poor. We

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The Cloud Project (2009) by Catherine Kramer and Zoe Papadopoulou,

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Wunderkammer,

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wonder chamber

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Superflux (Anab Jain and John Arden), The 5th Dimensional Camera, 2010.

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In several cases designers identified possible negative implications for the scientist's research but because of the trust they had shared felt it would be wrong to pursue these darker possibilities. For us, the most promising model is when a topic is explored in consultation with several scientists in order to maintain critical distance. CHAIN REACTIONS

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Re-imaging Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy Stephen Duncombe

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Large-scale speculative design contests "official reality"; it is a form of dissent expressed through alternative design proposals. It aims to be inspirational, infectious, and catalytic, zooming out and stepping back to address values and ethics.

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Design speculations can give form to the multiverse of worlds our world could be.

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captology.3

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We believe that even nonviable alternatives, as long as they are imaginative, are valuable and serve as inspiration to imagine one's own alternatives. Speculative design can be a catalyst for this: it can inspire imagination and a feeling that, if not exactly anything, more is definitely possible. Speculative design contributes to the reimagining not only of reality itself but also our relationship to reality.

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Panawave.

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japanese cult. micro utopia

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Joseph Popper addresses in his project One-Way Ticket (2012):

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Dunne & Raby, Very Large Bike (VLB), from United Micro Kingdoms, 2013.

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[Design can be] the stable platform on which to entertain unusual bedfellows. The glue for things that may not be naturally sticky. The lubricant that allows movement between ideas that don't quite run together. The medium through which we can make otherwise awkward connections and comparisons. The language for tricky conversations and translations.31

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The idea of the "proposal" is at the heart of this approach to design: to propose, to suggest, to offer something. This is what design is good at. It can sketch out possibilities. Although these proposals draw from rigorous analysis and thorough research, it's important they do not lose their imaginative, improbable, and provocative qualities.

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It's about meaning and culture, about adding to what life could be, challenging what it is, and providing alternatives that loosen the ties reality has on our ability to dream. Ultimately, it is a catalyst for social dreaming.

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