Speculative Everything

Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable.In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of designthat is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means ofspeculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort ofpredicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have beenproven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that areintended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do notwant).

Speculative Everything offers a tour through anemerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examplesfrom their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture,cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy oftechnology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; aflypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensationrecorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Rabycontend that if we speculate more -- about everything -- reality will become more malleable. Theideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Anthony Dunne is Professor and Head of the Design Interactions Programme at the Royal College of Art. He is the author of Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (MIT Press).