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77sqm_9:26min

by Forensic Architecture

Shortly after 17:00 on the 6th of April 2006, Halit Yozgat, 21 years old, was murdered while attending the reception counter of his family run Internet café in Kassel, Germany. His was the ninth of ten racist murders performed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground or NSU across Germany between 2000 and 2007.

At the time of the killing an internal security agent of the State Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz) of the German state of Hessen named Andreas Temme was present in the shop. He did not disclose this fact to the police, but was later identified from his internet records.

In his interrogation by the police and in the subsequent NSU trial in Munich, Temme denied being a witness to the incident, and claims not to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. The court accepted his testimony. It determined that Temme was present at the back room of the internet café at the time of the murder. It also accepted that from his position in the shop it was possible not to have witnessed the killing.

Within the 77 square meters of the Internet café and the 9:26 minutes of the incident, different actors crossed paths — members of migrant communities, a state employee and the murderers — and were architecturally disposed in relation to each other. The shop was thus a microcosm of the entire social and political controversy that makes the “NSU Complex”.

In November 2016 eleven Years after the murder, the People’s Tribunal “Unraveling the NSU Complex” commissioned Forensic Architecture to investigate Temme’s testimony and determine whether it could be truthful.(source)

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Fuck Fossils - a future you don't want

”Fuck Fossils” is a Norwegian short film about two teenagers stuck at home babysitting, during a rainstorm in November 2050. Their every day life carries the weight of climate change and the question on their mind is whether the world has managed to stop at the two-degree target? The film is based on the report ”A future you don´t want” by Thomas Cottis, funded by The Research Council of Norway and produced by Snøball Film. Lead roles are played by Thomas Hayes and Rebekka Kjølle. Directed by Marianne Kleven...(source)

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Universal Basic Income Experiments in Finland & California in Era of AI and Automation

In order to offset the effect of fourth industrial revolution: AI and Robots in every industry, In Dec 2016, Matt Krisiloff (Director, Y Combinator Research), Albert Wenger (Partner at Union Square Ventures), Roope Mokka (Co-Founder of Demos Helsinki) discussing "Universal Basic Income experiments undergoing in Finland and Oakland of US.

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A Basic Income for All: Dream or Delusion?

Fundamental shifts in the world of work are eroding traditional social safety nets. Could a universal basic income be the solution? - Amitabh Kant, Chief Executive Officer, NITI Aayog, India - Neelie Kroes, Non-Executive Member of the Board, Open Data Institute, United Kingdom - Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, Harvard University, USA - Guy Standing, Research Professor in Development Studies, University of London, United Kingdom Moderated by - Tamzin Booth, Business Editor, The Economist, United Kingdom

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The Tax Free Tour

"Where do multinationals pay taxes and how much?" Gaining insight from international tax experts, Backlight takes a look at tax havens, the people who live there and the routes along which tax is avoided globally. Those routes go by resounding names like 'Cayman Special', 'Double Irish', and 'Dutch Sandwich'. A financial world operates in the shadows surrounded by a high level of secrecy. A place where sizeable capital streams travel the world at the speed of light and avoid paying tax. The Tax Free Tour is an economic thriller mapping the systemic risk for governments and citizens alike. Is this the price we have to pay for globalised capitalism? At the same time, the free online game "Taxodus" by Femke Herregraven is launched. In the game, the player can select the profile of a multinational and look for the global route to pay as little tax as possible...(source)

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Life changing technology

...New technologies give us the possibility to record every second of our lives and to store it for eternity. The new generation of computer-controlled mini-cameras is now wearable on our bodies, taking automatically a picture every 3 seconds, and cannot be switched off. The techno-optimists call this form of archiving their existence: ‘Lifelogging’, and we can expect the technology business to evolve even further, possibly merging with our bodies. The perfect visual memory lies at hand’s reach and is even delivered with a search button. Is it a possibility that the image of reality will slowly become more real than the reality itself? Or is it already pointless to still make this distinction?

The technology history already showed us that the technology evolution goes so fast, now trends become obsolete in a matter of months. The digital video storage is getting cheaper and legislation always lags behind the development of new technology. And while new medicines have to go through endless testing before being put on the market, the technology outside the body has no limit and we can only find out the consequences it will have on us along the way...(source)

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Documentary: Producing the fairphone

Designer Bas van Abel decided to create a mobile phone, while exploiting man and nature as little as possible. The dilemma’s he encountered while manufacturing his Fairphone are lessons for everyone who strives to run a fair company. ‘If you can’t open it, you don’t own it’ is Bas van Abel’s motto. He wanted to know why telephone manufacturers supply a hermetically sealed black box that we as consumers are not allowed to open. In the Chinese city of Shenzhen, Van Abel tries to understand the innovative recycling and creative culture. Over the last five years, hundreds or even thousands of small factories have become so good at manufacturing, copying and repairing, that China now has grand ambitions to flood the world with its own designs and to manufacture telephones that are better than the existing brands...(source)

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Documentary: Cultural Barbarians - Is art dead?

Has art turned into nothing more than a market, where only museums’ visitors numbers count, or the stardom of an artist such as Ai Weiwei? A new generation of artists is fighting this trend and creating explicitly activist art connected to a changing world...(source)

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│ Exhibition │ Process Unfolding: Reflective Roaming – Design, ubiquitous fantasy, everyday reality

A pilot exhibition of an ongoing research project Reflective Roaming – Design, ubiquitous fantasy, everyday reality that unfolds the research processes through various media including texts, videos, objects and interactive installations at Gallery Rom 8 in Bergen, Norway. All are welcome!

Place: Rom 8. Vaskerelven 8, 5014 Bergen, Norway Exhibition period: Nov. 18th – Nov. 27th 2016 Opening hours: Weekday  14:00 - 18:00 Saturday Nov. 26th  12:00 - 18:00 Sunday Nov. 27th  12:00 - 16:00

Event page on Facebook

About the project This is an ongoing, practice-based research project questioning the status-quo of the technocratic promises that shapes economical and social-political dimensions in our everyday lives. What is the costs of being fully engaged with informative societies? How is humanity positioned in the intersection of information technology and market? How can design address these issues by a critical perspective? It is aiming to create spaces for critical reflection by visually and materially revealing the invisible relationships between design, information economy and humanity.

About Albert Cheng-Syun Tang (湯承勳) He is a designer, researcher and Taiwanese citizen who specializes in visual communication and has been exploring the possibility of converting design into critical practices. He is currently a research fellow at Dept. of Design at Bergen Academy of Art and Design affiliated with the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.

This project(2014-) is supported by the fellowship program of the Norwegian Artistic Research Program and Bergen Academy of Art and Design.

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The Design of Scarcity

Talks of the idea of “scarcity” by Jeremy Till(UK), John Habraken(NL), Axel Timm(DE) 

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Strange Design—From Objects to Behaviors

by Jehanne Dautrey & Emanuele Quinz

Number of pages: 380. Format : 150 x 230 mm Illustrations: two-colour printing. Language: English (US) Artistic direction: Ludovic Burel Graphic design:Clément Le Tulle-Neyret Translation from French into English: Jonathan & David Michaelson (JD-Trad) Isbn: 978 2 917053 26 3. Release date: April 2016

In recent years, strange—ambiguous, dysfunctional, enigmatic, and complicated—objects have emerged in the world of design. These objects are based on an approach that has been called anti-design, radical, conceptual, or critical design—a speculative design that instead of offering solutions raises questions. Design that is not subject to the imperatives of the power structures of society, but is instead critical. Via a strategy of modifying objects away from their usual forms and utilitarian functions, this design evokes unusual uses and behaviors, in turn opening the way to a more profound questioning of social and political values.

With the contributions of Gijs Bakker, Jurgen Bey, Pieke Bergmans, Bless, Jan Boelen, Elio Caccavale, Florence Doléac, Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, Didier Faustino, Catherine Geel, Ugo La Pietra, Mathieu Lehanneur, Luca Marchetti, Alessandro Mendini, Gianni Pettena, Stijn Ruys, and Noam Toran.

With the support of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Nancy, as well as the “Scènes du Monde, Création, Savoirs Critiques” Université Paris 8 Research Unit (EA 1573).(source)

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The multiple crises of neoliberal capitalism and the need for a global working class response

Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian

To what extent do you think the environmental challenges we face are an issue for the labor movement? And also, how can the labor movement work with the environmental movement to deal with the issues that we face?

The environmental movement is important to everybody who wants to survive. It’s not a joke. We might be entering the last century of human survival in any decent form.

If you follow the science journals, practically every day there’s a more threatening discovery. The Greenland ice, which was thought to be moored to the ground, turns out to be floating, which means it’s going to melt faster, which means the sea level will rise higher. As you probably noticed, last year was the warmest year on record, not just by a small, but by a huge amount, because it’s accelerating. In fact, the rate of warming now is apparently higher than it’s ever been in the whole geological record by a factor of about 100, or maybe even 1,000. We’re getting into extremely dangerous territory. Unless something is pretty quickly done to get off fossil fuels, the future looks pretty dim. There was a study that was reported in the MIT Technology Review last month saying that at this latitude the current average temperature rise is equivalent to moving south about ten meters a day. That’s pretty fast.

So is it important to the labor movement? Sure. It’s important to everyone, in fact, crucial. There’s a special problem that the labor movement has to face, that getting off fossil fuels is going to have a big effect unless something serious is done. It runs into a conflict with pressures for maintaining jobs and wages. That’s a problem that the labor movement has to deal with.

It’s not a fundamental problem, because there’s plenty of work that could be done that would be helpful to the environment—I mean simple things like weatherization of homes. The US is way behind other countries. There was a company in England that was working on weatherization, but it had essentially finished, so it tried to move to the US. And it couldn’t get started because there is not enough interest. High-speed rail. The US is practically the only country in the world that has no high-speed rail. It has a collapsing transportation system. Alternative energy projects generate jobs, from high-level tech to manufacturing. So there’s plenty of opportunities for other kinds of work and decent jobs and salaries.

But it’s a wrench to move from what exists, like, say, mining, to something totally new. It would require a serious government initiative. And that requires a pretty radical change in our political system, which is by now so far skewed to the right that things that are just taken for granted in other countries look impossibly radical here.

You might have seen a column by Paul Krugman a couple days ago opposing Bernie Sanders’s health-care program. What Bernie Sanders is advocating is what practically every other country in the world has. The US is almost alone in not having national health care. The US is ranked lowest among the wealthy countries, the OECD countries, in quality of health care, with about twice the per capita costs. Krugman’s argument is basically, well, it sort of sounds nice, but we can’t manage it here because of the power of financial institutions. What about the public? The public is strongly in favor of it. Even though practically nobody publicly advocates for it in the mainstream, still you have roughly 60 percent support for it, among Democrats about 80 percent. And this goes way back. Go back to the Reagan years. A large majority of the population thought it should be in the Constitution because it’s such an obvious necessity, and about 40 percent of the population thought it was in the Constitution. This is in the Reagan era. And it’s been steady all the way since. But it’s politically impossible to achieve because the country is not a functioning democracy. It’s a plutocracy run by financial institutions and others, so therefore we can’t do what every other country does. You can take a high-speed train from Beijing to Kazakhstan but not from Boston to New York.

So there are real social and political changes that have to take place internally in the country before we can even talk about the things that have to be done, and have to be done fast. It’s not a matter of the distant future. These are things that are vital for the next generation. So, yes, it’s serious, and it’s a very serious problem for the labor movement. A functioning, lively labor movement ought to be in the forefront of working on this.

A question about globalization. We find ourselves always competing, it feels like, against nonunion workers in developing countries. Do you see positive movement happening in organization in the developing countries like China that we find ourselves in competition with? And in what ways could we in the developed world move that forward?

Unions are called internationals, and there is a reason for that in history. If they can become internationals, that, I think, would be the answer. There’s tens of thousands of labor struggles going on every year in China, fighting for decent working conditions, for higher wages, for social and political issues. Western labor movements ought to be contributing to that. I think that is the way of addressing the question of competition: Develop reasonable working conditions, labor conditions, and take over factories in the developing countries like China, support the workers who are fighting hard for this. That’s to the benefit of American workers too, and the best approach, I think. Competition is what power centers want to drive wages and working conditions down. Cooperation internationally is what working people ought to want, just as domestically.

We’re often slaughtered in the public view by right-wing, anti-union extremists, and often they’re turning union members against their own interests. They do it through anger and hate, because that’s easier than education. I just want to know, do you have any suggestions for helping to get through to these people to listen to facts?

That’s no small matter, not just in the US. The same is happening in Europe and elsewhere. You’re right, it’s much easier to fire people up with shrieks and imprecations and hatred and kick somebody in the face who is even lower than you rather than to try to reason your way through these things. That’s always been true. And that’s the goal of serious organizing to overcome that.

And here what you’ve described is quite right. I have to say that what’s going on here now—I don’t want to draw...(source)

Image source

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The Perfect Human Being series - Cyborg Neil Harbisson can hear colours

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The triumph of design (thinking)

by Benjamin Evans

September’s edition of that venerable and elite journal of contemporary capitalism, the Harvard Business Review, is devoted to the evolution of something called “design thinking” and its role in current business practices. We are all likely familiar with the way in which design has come to play a central role in the viability of almost all consumer products, but perhaps less familiar with the way in which “design” has also recently become identified with an entire system of thinking and approaching problems. Design is no longer merely a necessary department in a corporate structure (a partner to “marketing” and “human resources”), but instead is rapidly playing an increasingly central role in management practices. So what is design thinking, and how might we respond to its uptake by corporate culture?

Briefly, design thinking simply means bringing methodologies, principles, and strategies that have evolved in the process of designing objects to bear on larger issues that do not necessarily involve objects at all. For example, when good designers approach a new project, they typically conduct considerable research in the field, looking at how objects are currently used and trying to empathize strongly with the needs and desires of users. “Solutions” are in some sense generated initially as a kind of wish list, and designers begin imagining ways in which these dreams can be realized (which is why it is sometimes called “solution focused” rather than “problem focused”). Wild “brainstorming” is one hallmark of a good design team, performed with a spirit of “anything goes,” even and including things that might go beyond the parameters of the original mission brief. Rapid prototyping is another central component, getting beta-test models into people’s hands and adapting quickly to feedback. Overall, the model is highly organic, venerating the ideas of mutation, iteration, and adaptation rather than efficiency and the discovery of a single correct solution. Instead of steadily, logically isolating all factors of a problem to arrive at a single inexorable answer (akin to a more “scientific” method), good designers iterate relentlessly, proceeding in multiple directions simultaneously and allowing accidents, chances, and unexpected combinations of previous ideas to appear. The object is constantly mutating, shedding or adding buttons and cables, adopting new inputs, growing, shrinking, changing color, or becoming more easily rechargeable.

Design thinking, then, brings something like this process to problems and issues beyond the creation of sleek objects or physical spaces. Designers today are also asked to design more abstract things such as “systems” and “experiences.” How, for example, might a visit to a hospital emergency room be designed so as to provide a minimally traumatic experience? How might school programs be designed to reduce childhood obesity? How might the development of electric-car infrastructure be designed so as to serve government, business, and consumer interests simultaneously? Even further removed, designers today must sometimes help design the systematic contexts in which their designs are ultimately to be realized, as the HBR cover story “Design for Action” explains. Because innovative products and ideas can “encounter stiff resistance from their intended beneficiaries” (Brown & Martin, p. 59), particularly in contexts in which various stakeholders have a vested interest in traditional ways of doing things, designers must now design ways to lessen this resistance and allow innovation to happen more fluidly. If a corporate structure is part of what holds a corporation back from producing innovative solutions, then its structure might be in need of redesign, or if traditional advertising strategies fail to win consumer approval, new ways in which companies and consumers relate to one another might be reimagined. What, then, are we to make of these recent developments?

On the one hand, it is quite easy to celebrate the many well-publicized success stories of design thinking and see in them considerable hope for the future. David Kelly, founder of design powerhouse IDEO, gave a Ted Talk in 2007 on the subject of “human-centered design,” and used as an illustration the tremendous work of ApproTec (today operating as “Kickstart”), which designed inexpensive irrigation pumps to increase the income of very poor African farmers. Or consider the extraordinarily ambitious work of Participle, whose “objective is to transform the way public services are designed and delivered, laying the foundation for a new kind of welfare state that starts with people: their everyday lives, hopes and dreams.” Even more ambitiously, the HBR article details the complex strategy of Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, the CEO of Peru’s Intercorp Group, for “designing a new Peru,” one that has a better distribution of wealth and a more developed middle class.

Many of the examples available, and the general tenor of the rhetoric, suggest that design thinking leads to a world in which creative people are using their imaginations to make the world, actively and practically, a better place. Its pioneers, people such as Tim Brown (current CEO of IDEO and likely the most well-known figure in the area), are encouraging designers to “think big” and reject the idea that design is merely a tool for fabricating consumer goods. If this is what design thinking is all about, and if it is indeed enjoying a golden age, it is not hard to imagine in the future a small army of intelligent, imaginative, empathetic problem solvers tackling difficult real-world problems. This is what makes the image of design thinking so attractive — it is placed squarely between the efficient but generally amoral, rigid, and ponderous activity of the sciences and the idealistic, but generally impractical, abstract, and ineffective activities of the humanities. Through this lens, the adoption of design thinking by the business community might well be seen as indicating the possibility of a more creative, empathetic, imaginative spirit of capitalism around the corner.

On the other hand, or perhaps through another lens, the proximity of creative designers and corporate management can be seen in a more sinister light. Rather than rebelling against the status quo and providing some measure of countercultural resistance (one of the roles traditionally associated with certain corners of creative practice), part of me cannot help but feel that today’s most creative minds are being channeled into serving the interests of big business and that this recent development is nothing more than the capstone on a history of the institutionalization of creative practice.

Supporting this claim requires a brief detour into...(source)

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The School of Constructed Realities

by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

Today we visited a new school of design developed specifically to meet the challenges and conditions of the 21st century. It offers only one degree, an MA in Constructed Realities. Having sat through the presentations for the open day, we were still a little unclear about its distinctions between real realities, unreal realities, real unrealities, and unreal unrealities, but we were intrigued enough to want to know more.

The school provides a mix of theory, practice, and reflection. There are no disciplines in the conventional sense; instead, students study bundles of subjects. Some that caught our attention were “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Critical Theory” combined with “Impossible Architecture”; “Scenario Making and Worldbuilding” mixed with “Ideology and Found Realities”; and “CGI and Simulation Techniques” taught alongside “The History of Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories, Hoaxes, and Advertising.” Projects are expressed through various forms of reality: mixed, immersive, simulated, unmediated, and so on. Students can also attend the classes “Multiverses and Branding,” “The Suspension, Destruction, and Production of Disbelief,” “Reality Fabrication: Bottom Up or Top Down?,” “The Politics of the Unreal,” “Reality: Local Variations,” and our favorite, “The Aesthetics of Unreality.”

After the presentations we asked the director about the thinking behind the school. He was a little reticent at first, which is understandable knowing the risks associated with relocating design from its cozy home in the old reality-based community to a new one among reality makers, fabricators, and constructors, but he was keen to share. He began by explaining that in his view, for most people today reality isn’t working, that it broke sometime near the end of the 20th century:

“It’s clear that reality only works for a privileged minority, but designers advocate a realist approach, which means they work within the constraints of reality as it is, for the minority. The school aims to challenge this by making reality a little bit bigger to provide more room for different kinds of dreams and hopes. An important part of this process is generating multiple versions of reality, and this is where design comes in.”

“We concluded,” he said, “that the only way to challenge this unsatisfactory situation was to be unrealistic—to breach realism’s heavily policed borders and to fully embrace unreality.”

Listening to him, we began to think so too.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are designers, educators, and founders of the London-based studio Dunne & Raby.

Image: Filip Dujardin. Untitled, from the series Fiction, 2007. Digital photography.

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Introduction to Speculative Design Practice

Ivica Mitrović

Discursive and Critical Design Practice

From the modernist perspective, design has been primarily regarded as a problem-solving practice, usually dealing with problems detected by other professions. In this sense, the mission of design is closely linked to the needs of the industry or, in a broader sense, the creation of a better living standard. From such modernist perspective, design is seen as a service activity that primarily addresses clients’ needs. However, as graphic designer and publicist Dejan Kršić points out, design has always been a signifying practice that generates, analyses, distributes, mediates and reproduces social meaning, especially nowadays, in the context of the new social, technological, media and economic conditions.

The relation between design and art (and other related disciplines) can be observed in several stages, i.e. from the high modernist synthesis of applied arts, visual arts and design in the 1950s, to the scientification of design throughout the 1960s and the emphasis on its rationality and the postmodernist position in which it is once again positioned at the centre of the interrelations of various disciplines, no longer through a complete synthesis, but, above all, through their interaction. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that an increasing number of designers take upon some new approaches to design. These “new designers” act on the borders of traditionally defined disciplines,removing the borders between them.

In their research, these new designers relate to diverse fields of science, primarily computer sciences and engineering, sociology, psychology, architecture, and, in the recent times, increasingly to biotechnology, all with the goal of critically reflecting on the development and role of technology in society. Designers re-think the role of technology in everyday life, without dealing with the applications of technology, but rather by considering its implications. Turning away from the com- mercial aspects of design with the focus on the demands of the market, they are now engaged with a broader social context. The new designers use design as a medium and focus on concepts and artefacts, and, rather than solving problems, ask questions and open issues to discussion.

The researcher and educator Ramia Mazé says there are three different approaches to critical design practice: the first sees designers reflecting on and critically questioning their own design practice; the second approach is based on a macro-perspective, re-thinking the design discipline as such; whereas in the third approach the design discourse is directed towards broader social and political phenomena. Mazé points out that these approaches are not mutually exclusive, as they most often intertwine and supplement each other in practice.

Historical references of critical design practice point to radical architecture of the 1960s, and partially to the critical practice of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art. They are particularly inspired by the narrative quality and imaginary worlds of literature and film. Design and critical practice create more intense links in the interaction design, a specialized field of design that emerged in the early 1990s as a result of the accelerated development of digital technologies. The classical definition of interaction design describes it as a practice dealing with the ways in which people connect via the products and technologies they use, i.e. with the design of our everyday lives via digital artefacts. Today, it is most commonly associated with the design of digital products, applications or services.

In this context, through his own personal design practice, and later through the establishment of a novel educational approach as the Head of the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art (rca) for many years, Anthony Dunne, in an approach he termed “critical design”, has dealt with the aesthetics of the use of new technologies in the context of electronic products. However, over the years, and in collaboration with Fiona Raby, he expanded the focus of his activities to the cultural, social and ethical implications of new technologies, and, most recently, onspeculations about broader social, economic and political issues. Alternative presents and speculative futures (Auger). Here and now: everyday life and real products available on the market. The higher the line, the more emergent the technology and the longer and less predictable the transit to everyday life. Speculative futures exist as projections of the lineage in future. The alternative reality presents a shift from the lineage at some point in the past to re-imagine our technological present.

Speculating through Design: a question instead of an answer

Speculative design is a critical design practice that comprises or is related to a series of similar practices known under the following names: critical design, design fiction, future design, anti-design, radical design, interrogative design, discursive design, adversarial design, futurescape, design art, transitional design etc. For instance, design fiction is a potential genre of speculative design practice, and “critical design”, as defined by Dunne, is a possible approach.

Speculative design is a discursive practice, based on critical thinking and dialogue, which questions the practice of design (and its modernist definition). However, the speculative design approach takes the critical practice one step further, towards imagination and visions of possible scenarios. Speculative design is also one of the most representative examples of the new interaction between various disciplines. It is therefore interesting to see how new designers view their practice: they call themselves trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary or even post-designers, quite often even simply – designers. Sometimes they do not even declare to be acting from the design perspective at all.

By speculating, designers re-think alternative products, systems and worlds. Designer and teacher at the rca, James Auger, says that this design (i) moves away from the constraints of the commercial practice (steered by the market); (ii) uses fiction and speculates on future products, services, systems and worlds, thus reflectively examining the role and impact of new technologies on everyday life; (iii) and initiates dialogue between experts (scientists, engineers and designers) and users of new technologies (the audience).

Today we can see that capital uses promotion and investments in the technology by programming the technological development to actually...(source)

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On Speculative Design

by Benjamin H. Bratton

Speculative Design (SD) understands itself as progressive alternative perspective to mainstream Design culture (and as an alternative to other alternatives as well).1 It knows that “Design” is not some magic way of thinking (involving stick-up notes, sharpies and colored beanbags) that just makes things better by “building trust,” “understanding the customer” or “getting a seat at the table” or similar. Design is also the means by which pathological relationships to material culture are made more efficient and more delightful, and we are worse for it. Some may even conclude that the job of Design in the 21st century is to undo (much of) the Design of 20th. It may also be to re-claim and re-launch other frustrated Modern impulses that were dry-docked by century’s end, not only designing things —widgets, withdrawn objects, manifest subjectivities, formal forms, etc.— but also designing the relations between them: systems, supply-chains, encounters, obligations, accounting protocols, and so on.

As an alternative perspective, speculation is not ephemeral or disengaged. The prevalence of models for risk patterns, ideal options, and plotted-outcomes underscores that speculation itself is not a supplemental or marginal process. It is less “airy-fairy” than it is nuts and bolts: whether for commodities and equities futures, automated A/B testing, enterprise reinsurance or weather forecasting, the global economy functions by speculative models of the near or long-term future.2 But if so does this disqualify the speculative from the figuring of fundamental alternatives? It does not. Instead of concluding that the future (and futurism per se) is lost it we should commandeer modeling infrastructures for better and more vibrant purposes. For this, speculative models are rotated from one purpose to another: less to predict what is most likely to happen (deriving value from advance simulation of given outcomes) than to search the space of actual possibility (even and especially beyond what any of us would conceive otherwise.)3 That is, predictive models are adaptive because they need to be descriptive, but for speculation, models are prescriptive because they need to become normative. Between them we track different uses for contingency, imminence, simulation, navigation, resistance, governmentality, universality, neutrality, etc.4 That is where Design becomes designation.5

Futurism, Scale

For obvious reasons it is commonly presumed that there must be an overlap between SD and the more general pursuit of Design Futures, or prototypes from the worlds of tomorrow. Sometimes there are clear alignments, especially for SD projects that address “the future” explicitly as critical subject matter. As I put it elsewhere, in our culture speaking about “the future” is a way of saying things about the present—critical, utopian, projective, pragmatic and/or simply unspeakable things—but too often it is an alibi for saying nothing at all.6 “The future” is that place where skateboards hover and ambient fields of graphical user-interfaces are slightly more elysian; it is a rhetorical sink where half-baked marketing plans usurp the place where actual ideas are supposed to go.

Given this, we may expect a more intellectually and politically rigorous SD to resist—or even eliminate—futurity as a key concept or site condition. Some might insist that it focus instead on the most immediate at-hand frames of spatial and temporal reference, and to deal with coming conditions largely through the hard or soft survivalist aesthetics that ensue. “There is no time, and there is only this place” may be the rationale for this emergency interventionism. Others lament that facts on the ground are out-of-sync with fragmented social history. They hint that until recent times sociological “cognitive maps,” on the one hand, and systemic historical unfolding, on the other, may have been in conflict but at least their common ground felt solid. For this perspective, the answer to the malaise of network culture is to re-glue the scale and tempo of global forces back to the dialectic parameters of social and psychological history.

I argue that these are both insufficient responses, and that a detected derangement of familiar spatial and temporal scales is not only not pathological, but may be a precondition for any properly calibrated Design imaginary. Design, as we know, can adhere to small, medium, large or extra-large spatial scales (a single object, a large architecture, an urbanism or a transcontinental system). It can also be trained on very short- or very long-term durations (now, later, much later, afterwards) suited to instantaneous user response, the next launch cycle, the lifecycle of a city, or a geologic trace). We may presume that large scales and long durations are natural matches, but there is no reason to hold fast to this. Very small-scale spatial projects with very long duration ramifications are as likely as very large-scale spatial projects with instantaneous durations, and so we can imagine a combinatory matrix of spatial and temporal scales for design analysis and intervention. It is not here and now versus there and then...(source)