Speculative Design and Education in (and Beyond) Troubled Times

Is now the time to start building new horizons, starting from education? Since its rapid growth during the 20th Century, design has mostly played an uncritical supporting role to industry and the application of technology. In the current pandemic crisis, we are witnessing a return to the dangerous notion that technology will be fundamental to our future survival, ignoring the fact that techno-solutionism (which also shaped mainstream design practices) got us into this mess in the first place. Both the systems in which designed artefacts are manufactured and the systems in which they function have changed irrevocably over the past half century, yet much design practice remains unchanged.

The pragmatic, self-contained and skills-based nature of design education largely reflects this old-fashioned notion of design - blindly optimistic and frequently unaware of the larger complex systems in which design happens. One (potentially) positive factor to emerge from the current crisis is how convincingly it has exposed the fragility of many of these systems, in particular the economic system of capitalism with which the contemporary design industry is so well-aligned. This exposé should provide an opportunity for rethinking the aspects of our systems that render them so fragile, so vulnerable to a single act of nature.

What might design learn from and how might it adapt to this new perspective? Speculative Design (SD) emerged around 20 years ago to provide a counter-approach to mainstream market-oriented design and as such perhaps could offer some insights to help address this question. The academic context in which SD typically takes place facilitates decoupling of practice from the market imperatives that constrain mainstream design, allowing for the development of a more expanded and responsible approach to design. But what new skills and knowledge does such an approach demand?

Disciplines such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and bioethics are far in advance of SD in their understanding of how complex social, political, and cultural values relate to scientific research and technological application; philosophers of technology have for decades been questioning notions of automation and our increasing dependency on technology; psychologists and social scientists are researching the impact of contemporary media (amongst other things) on humans and society. For many years SD was known (and criticised) for its ability to create future dystopias. Now, as reality threatens to become more dystopian than fiction, might be the right time to move to a more constructive approach, to speculate on optimistic futures that could realistically be achieved. It may also be useful to look at how past experiences from SD practice could “close the loop”, and bring our knowledge and insights from interactions with the future to bear directly on our current activities and strategies.

We hope that SD has created a small foundation for design to move forward post shutdown - to discuss what is or should be the role of design in the 21st Century, and how we can educate students for the decades to come. In a sense we are all “paper architects” now – constrained by The Great Pause, kept away from our classrooms, workshops and studios. Therefore, in this discussion, we aim to give free rein to our speculative imaginations, set our sights on the future, and ask: What should the new design curriculum look like?

Discussants:

Daniel Charny (Kingston University)
Khashayar Razghandi (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces)
Anne Lefebvre (ENS Paris-Saclayrs)
Andrea Gaspar (CRIA) 

Moderator: James Auger (SpeculativeEdu)

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