Speculative design for the real world
How speculative design methods can drive innovation
“User centricity is incredibly problematic. Focusing on the narrow goals of the user as it relates to the business as it exists today leads us to a narrow view of the opportunity space that we’re working in.” — J. Paul Neeley, Speculative Designer
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” the tech exec Ken Olson declared in 1977. The computers of his day — hulking, five-ton calculators — were a niche obsession for early technologists. But their impact, clearly, was underestimated.
This is partly due to a phenomenon known as Amara’s law, which says that we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but greatly underestimate its impact in the long run.
Though we might like to believe that technological impact is predicted and planned by some brilliant Tech Gods, the reality is more chaotic. More often than not, technological progress is the result of a series of incremental innovations by disparate groups, oblivious to the consequences of their quests to strike gold (here’s lookin’ at you, Zuck).
“How might we leverage technology X to increase profits?” is the guiding question of many companies today. Whether it’s social media, AR, VR, IoT, biometrics or machine learning, we rush so fast to keep up that we rarely stop to ask why we’re doing what we’re doing.
But because humans have this myopic tendency (for now, it’s mostly still humans designing our future), we should be thinking about how to immunize ourselves against this short-term fallacy. One way to do this is by embracing speculative design.
Speculative What?
Speculative design, sometimes called critical design or design fiction, asks us to zoom out beyond user-centered design and ask what the effects of our designs could be on future societies. It’s not necessarily problem solving (prototyping); it’s not trying to predict the future (forecasting), and it’s not pure criticism. It’s concerned with possibilities, not probabilities, pushing us to consider our preferences over a set of possible futures and the ways in which the objects we design help or hinder our attempts to build those futures.
A work of speculative design is often an object, like Auger Loizeau’s Flypaper Robotic Clock, but could also take the form of a political pamphlet (Sternberg Press’s Solution Series), a photo series (Revital Cohen’s Life Support), or even a TV series (Black Mirror).
These works act as design probes that help us articulate how we want to interact with our future environment and within our future society. While prototyping deals with how an idea could be realized, speculative design asks what if that idea was prevalent in our society? Would we want it?
Of course, the next obvious question is: “Who’s we”? This speaks to a valid caveat. Speculative design does not intend to drive consensus or serve as a facilitative toolkit for quick decision-making. It isn’t a simple solution to our world’s greatest problems. It’s a way of using design to ask “what if?” and “is this a good idea?” before asking, “how do we make it happen?”
Why Now?
Today, algorithms can diagnose better than some doctors. They power products that will wipe out the majority of trucking jobs in the next 20 years. They can trade stocks, troll Twitter, block malware, and even predict recidivism (the latter, it has been noted, raises civil rights issues). As our personal data becomes aggregated, commoditized and re-personalized, our definition of what it means to live in a society is changing. Speculative design may help us define preferable futures for our communities, our economies, and even our concentrations of power.
If we think of power as a composite of force, scrutiny and perception control, as Harvard Fellow Jamie Susskind suggests, then we see that technological innovation has helped shift the center of power towards corporations and away from governments. This is both exciting and terrifying. Speculative design can help us parse out which possibilities are terrifying and which are exciting.
Bjørn Karmann’s Project Alias is a good example of this. Alias is a “teachable parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants. It’s not mass produced, and is more intended to be circulated as an idea than as a product. It attaches to the top of any smart assistant and ensures that the “assistant” is unable to listen unless specifically called on by a code name. By presenting a new possible future, the project asks us to re-examine our comfort level with increasingly invasive surveillance technology.
Speculative Design in the Real World
Beyond design fictions like Black Mirror, speculative design is mostly stuck in academia or oohed and aahed at in high-brow museums. The kind of experimentation we allow in art universities is often considered silly or irrelevant, if not actually prohibited, in profit-driven industries.
But we only have to look back at Amara’s law to remind ourselves that we are not always as smart as we think we are. Truly forward-thinking companies do use speculative design (whether they know it or not) to consider possible futures, define the preferable ones, and then work toward them.
We could sum up these preferences in a few made-up quotes:
“I believe in a preferable future containing a 100-percent-sustainable and automatic transport system.” — Elon Musk, Founder of Tesla
“I believe in a preferable future in which we are all intuitively aware of how to use everything we touch.” — Jonathon Ive, Chief Designer at Apple
“I believe in a preferable future in which living with disabilities in a non-issue.” — Chieko Asakawa, AI Design Fellow at IBM
Microsoft, Google and Apple hire sci-fi writers to help accelerate their innovation, and though certainly some of the writers’ work shows negative consequences of possible technological developments, that’s kind of the point: Present the ideas. Articulate them visually, verbally, experientially. Examine them from all angles. Then decide if they should be released into the world.
Let’s Get Practical
Current user- and customer-centered design practices focus on designing for a very narrow group. Defined personas, segmentations or archetypes that represent people either somewhat likely to buy the thing or very likely to buy the thing. This makes sense, and I’m not advocating for “design for everyone.” I am advocating for thorough thinking about the knock-on effects that our designs could have on the environment and society in the future.
I’m suggesting, in other words, that we reverse the process and ask what kind of society we might prefer, rather than devising a crisis management plan 10 years down the line for that totally unexpected (read: inevitable) oil spill or other cataclysm.
What does this look like in practice? While it isn’t the same as prototyping, speculative design can be a precursor to prototyping. In my experience, making time for future-oriented design sprints within your organization is the best way to transform these philosophical ideas into something tangible. Questions like “What might nutrition look like in the future?”, “How might we understand ‘friendship’ in the future?” or “What could the concept of money be like in 50 years?” can drive “speculative design sprints” that may spur new ideas for uncommon partnerships or form the basis of a movement toward a more preferable future.
You can sell this to your boss by telling her that it will increase the bottom line eventually, like investing in energy-efficient light bulbs. You might be right. You’re probably right. But that’s not the point.
As the originators of the practice, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, put it: “Design today is concerned primarily with commercial and marketing activities, but it could operate on a more intellectual level. It could place new technological developments within imaginary but believable everyday situations that would allow us to debate the implications of different technological futures before they happen.”
As our technological capabilities increase exponentially and far ahead of our expectations, we need to release ourselves from the constraints of short-term revenue cycles to speculate on alternative futures, in hopes that we might shape them.
