Seeds for New Beginnings? Ecological Uncertainty, Blurry Ideology, and Speculative Design at the Universitas Symposium, 1972

In 1972, designer Emilio Ambasz (b. 1943) organized the symposium “The Universitas Project” at MoMA in New York City. The issue at stake was how the field of design should tackle the possibly irresolvable societal, political, and ecological problems of post-industrial society. Ambasz proposed a new design approach, which he named design as a mode of thought, with the aim of building a new research-education institution for design that could tackle the wicked problems ahead. In order to articulate his proposal, Ambasz turned to the speculative realm: discursive design critique, metaphysical cybernetics, design fiction, and storytelling. By critically engaging with some of the participants’ conference presentations, the article first discusses how the concept of the environment was reconfigured by the emerging ecological catastrophe. Then the article discusses ideological responses to the Universitas Project to show how the seemingly different ideological positions between French so-called “radical left” and American “right-wing technocrats” were grounded in the same; all-encompassing uncertainty and a strive for open-endedness. Finally, the article analyses Ambasz’s design fiction writing and the speculative nature of the Universitas and thereby identifies the Universitas as a rare moment in the history of design in which design stopped engaging in the status quo and turned towards a speculative future for finding seeds for new beginnings. The article re-visits the Universitas in order to support a presentist argument: that speculation, discursive design critique, and storytelling might not be sufficient methods on their own to tackle the forthcoming accelerating wicked uncertainties that lie ahead.