Toward an Ethics of Speculative Design

Abstract

In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, And Social Dreaming, designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby reassure us that, "the purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than predict the future." (1) Their work and the work of other speculative designers drive design beyond the user and problem solving orientation of commercial design practices. They challenge us to attend to the agency of material, to the process of making, to the demand of things on us, and most importantly to design as a critical practice of questioning ourselves through our things. Extending Dunne and Raby's call to projection into alternate possibilities, I argue that speculative design is a material practice of ethical creative coexistence as distinct from standardized, industrial design solutions. Simply put, speculative design makes us think beyond ourselves and fosters the ethical comportment of recognized non-identity resistant to instrumentalization. My argument stems from the 21st century need to confront wasteful and thoughtless overconsumption and related social, political and environmental abuses fueled by a need to control and master, natural and artificial goods, as well as socio-economic identity. In particular, design in the 20th century that aimed to standardize production, to universalize market appeal, to emphasize uniformity, to focus on human comfort and to market products as singular, isolated machines of modernity is no longer sustainable. Countering the modern impulse to dominate the world of natural resources, technological advancements and synthetic materials speculative practices utilize an object oriented perspective of coexistence and ask how can we design beyond our own needs? The conceptual path of my argument relies on the speculative philosophical approaches of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter and her attention to the agency of things, Timothy Morton's Realist Magic and his celebration of object opacity, and Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology and his strategies to enact an object orientation. (2) These philosophers offer alternatives to user-centric instrumental thinking in service of efficiency and commercial dominance by fundamentally challenging our relationship with things in the world. Their perspectives utilize speculation as a way to attend to the opacity, the complexity and the specificity of things able to chart a claim of object agency and in turn human responsibility. Together these efforts release us from the dominance of categorical and instrumental thinking, making and using. Correspondingly, the concrete path of my argument relies on two design two examples that represent a range of design between universal ambition and local amplification: the globally branded Starbucks coffee cup, a standardized design object speculatively received and Marti Guixe's, The Solar Kitchen Restaurant for La pin Kulta (2011) a design project that reimagines the restaurant by structurally incorporating features of practical speculation. The project is described as a "nature-driven" restaurant experience that features flexibility and immediacy in a way that challenges consumers and the chef alike. (3) In both cases, I want to emphasize the advantage of a speculative perspective for makers as well as consumers, as both are responsible regarding how things are used and abused. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Speculative philosophy and design emerges out of the need for alternative approaches attentive to the ethical demand of coexistence. A form of speculative philosophy, Object-oriented ontology allows us to consider things beyond phenomenological "things-in-themselves," before and beyond human service as worth speculating about. Graham Harman's Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects is a helpful place to begin our search into how one can understand speculation and make it productive in relation to objects or things. In the book's introduction Harman writes of Heidegger's account of things as awaiting use and "practical" philosophy: Insofar as the vast majority of these tools remain unknown to us, and were certainly not invented by us (for example, our brains and our blood cells), it can hardly be said that we "use" them in strict sense of the term. …