WEEK 6 - SPECULATIVE DESIGN & DESIGN FUTURES

This week’s lecture was focused on Speculative Design & Design Futures. Speculative design is a term that describes methods that proposes alternative visions. It materializes these visions while not losing the qualities of being still non-transparent (1). Design Futures is firmly committed to the creation of educated designers. What this means is an education whereby the designer understands the world in which they are going to practice – socially, culturally, economically, politically and environmentally (2).

The first exercise that we did was relating to design futures. This was called ‘The Polak Game’. The floor was divided into four sections and each section represented a feeling about our future. Upper left represented that our future is good and getting better and there’s nothing we can do to change it. Upper right represented that our future is good and getting better and we CAN act to make things better. Lower left represented that our future is getting worse and there’s nothing we can do to change it. Lower right represented that our future is getting worse generally, but we CAN make a difference here and now. I personally think that the lower right section was the best choice. This is because, as product designers, we are still learning about design and how to make things better in the future but we haven’t made a difference yet, but right now we are able to make a difference through our projects in different areas and learning new design methods that we can use in the future. Our own future is determined by the choices that we make or don’t make. Those choices don’t just impact the moment, they echo throughout our professional and personal lives.

Another exercise that we did was three statements of protest. For this exercise, we were told to write down an issue that makes you angry in contemporary society, one thing humans are doing/ have done to create this, and one thing the designed world is contributing to this.

Another exercise that we did was a card game called ‘The Thing from the Future’. The Thing from the Future is an imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures. The object of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of hypothetical objects from different near-, medium-, and long-term futures (3). Each round, players collectively generate a creative prompt by playing a card game. This prompt outlines the kind of future that the thing-to-be-imagined comes from, specifies what part of society or culture it belongs to, describes the type of object that it is, and suggests an emotional reaction that it might spark in an observer from the present. Players must then each write a short description of an object that fits the constraints of the prompt. These descriptions are then read aloud (without attribution), and players vote on which description they find the most interesting, provocative, or funny. The winner of each round keeps the cards put into play for that round, and whoever has the most cards when the game ends is declared the overall winner.

Overall, after this lecture, I feel that thinking about the future can be fun, stressful, and unpredictable. We have no idea where the future is going to take us. We just have to hope for the best, but as designers, we need to prepare for the worst. Although as designers, we must remember that we must do what we can to make our future better.

References:

1. Studio Dust (2017) '1.3 Definitions: Speculative Design' [website] (Accessed 27th April 2020); http://studiodust.nl/?p=1255

2. Whiting, P. (2011) 'Re-educating Designers, Re-directing Design, Design Futures' [PDF document p2] (Accessed 27th April 2020); https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/42782/73420_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

3. Circular Design Europe (2018) 'The Thing from the Future' [website] (Accessed 27th April 2020); http://circulardesigneurope.eu/oer/the-thing-from-the-future/

Picture Reference:

Bysteve (n.d.) 'Build the future test design' , Dreamstime [website] (Accessed 4th April 2020);

https://www.dreamstime.com/build-future-text-design-build-future-text-design-colored-red-yellow-grunge-image143457558