Speculation and learning to See Differently
In my college project group there’s a conspiracy theories going on:
“It feels like our Creativity tutor is toying with us — playing a game” says one member.
Last night, and the night before, I watched the series ‘Years and Years’. The series uses speculation to trace social and technical topics, year by year, into ten years into the future.
Speculation is one method for creativity, and described and explored in Dunne and Raby’s ‘Speculative Everything’. It posits that we have downgraded our dreams to simply become hopes. Hope that life will get a little bit better, or that we won‘t destroy the world, that we can avoid catastrophe.
“It is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than
an alternative to Capitalism” — Fredric Jameson in ‘Speculative Everything’.
Since the collapse of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall, design has become homogenised. Political Systems were ways that revolutionaries designed a better future. These hopes and ideals shaped people’s minds from which they manifested physical objects.
Alan Curtis, in Hypernormalisation, shows a Russian woman being interviewed in her home when it was clear Communism had failed. The interviewers asks “what are you dreams?”. She didn’t understand the question fully, as she had no dreams.
Dunne and Raby argue that design became hypercommercialised in the 1980s, alternative design was lost. Whilst design was embraced by big business, it was only at a superficial level. “Market-led capitalism won and reality instantly shrank.”
Anab Jain, co-founder and creative director of Superflux designs and builds prototypes for future technology, and uses them as prompts to imagine what it would feel like to live with these systems. How will the consequences of today could affect our future? For example, Anab created the smell of the air in 2030, if we didn’t change our pollution levels. When government officials in UAE smelled the air, they changed their energy policy. Anab thinks things through—and says most people do not. We put things off, thinking we’ll deal with them tomorrow. Grandmother Lyon’s speech (video below) is a great example of how we let things slip and our future outlook gets worse and worse.
We are constantly looking out for weak signals, those murmurs of future potential, then we trace the threads of potential out into the future, asking “what might it be like to live in that future?” Anab Jain
The idea of speculation is to help guide us towards the preferable, rather than the probable, that could quite easily be the dystopia of ‘Years and Years’.
Examples of topics that Russell traces into the future are: Trump and fake news, a comedic UK Prime Minister, young people wanting to become ‘trans’ (trans-human, in this case, merging with technology), Russian hacking (that cause power cuts, so people start using paper again, and filing cabinets), and English person having to cross the channel in an overloaded inflatable.
The country turns very quickly into a horror movie. It was written before we knew of the Covid crisis, and whilst it touches on Covid, it fails to imagine the true horror of our present day reality. Which makes the other themes he chooses only too believable.
Watching Years and Years left me feeling like I’ve been pushed through our tutor’s game, through the playful speculation, to the harsh reality of ‘what will happen if we don’t do anything?’ It made me think we’re all heading for disaster if we don’t break free and act now.
We have to radically change our mental model, to wake up and create a new schema, to create a new reality. Plato’s concepts are more real than the physical manifestations because they create our future reality.
We need a whole cohort of people who believe, a movement of new thinkers. New designers. We need to THINK now so we know how to act in the future. Know how to SEE the present and imagine the future. The speculative thinking may have been a simple thought experiment—but was it designed to wake up 50 masters students? It feels like were emerging from the Matrix’s pods, and as designers, we realise that it is our responsibility. Was this our tutor’s vocation after leaving Microsoft? To create an army of 50 people year on year with an amplified view to design the future? To avoid the probable and work towards the preferable?
There have been other experiences where I have been pushed through one reality to see another hopeful reality on the other side. The first was The Landmark Forum. One exercise using monologue, takes you on a journey of fear. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine everything that the course leader was saying. I didn’t get it — maybe I wasn’t prepared to embrace my fear, but others around me started wailing, shouting and being vocally upset. This went on for 20 minutes until someone laughed. Not laughing at the people making noises. They laughed because they endured the feelings all the way though until the end. At the end there was only relief, joy and laughter. Soon many others were laughing too.
Another experience, where I did get it was Powa. An advanced secret Buddhist Meditation. There’s lots of chanting and imagining fantastical things, which goes on for days. It was day 3 where it seemed like the ground I was sat on rose up to meet the fantastical images in my head. The two became one, and in that moment the images were real. I had arrived at the wonderful place where the meditation was leading: thought giving rise to a better world.
A third experience was on an assertiveness course for HIV group-work trainers, 20 years ago. The exercise had three parts. First, you wrote on flip chart paper all the things you’ve heard in your life about what people say about gay people (dirty, filthy, diseased…). The second part you wrote all the names of all the gay people you knew in the media, and what they were like (camp, bitchy, funny, flamboyant…), and a discussion followed to see if participants identified with any. The answer was a clear no. The third part of the exercise we had to imagine arriving in Mars, because we had been banished from earth for being gay. The group leaders played the martians, and we had to persuade them to let us in. The only problem was, the martians had the flip chart papers with all the bad stuff written on them ‘about us’.
The arguments went on for over an hour, got quite heated, and eventually had to be abandoned. We didn’t arrive on the other side, we failed. The other side was to ‘not justify our existence’ and if we weren’t welcome, to turn away and find another planet.
Let’s hope that this game will get us through the other side to create a digital product, service or infrastructure that will actually do some good, rather than harm.
“Creating concrete experiences can bridge the disconnect between today and tomorrow. By putting ourselves into different possible futures, by becoming open and willing to embrace the uncertainty and discomfort that such an act can bring, we have the opportunity to imagine new possibilities.
We can find optimistic futures; we can find paths forward; we can move beyond hope into action. It means we have the chance to change direction, a chance to have our voices heard, a chance to write ourselves into a future we want. Other worlds are possible.” Anab Jain
