Panel discussion on the role of speculation and fiction as modes of inquiry, exploration and understanding in design.
Björn Franke
Ramona Sprenger
Rosario Hurtado
Max Mollon
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Democracy Fiction: Speculation as a Political Tool
Speculation enables us to think collectively about futures. In view of the challenges of our time, we urgently need narratives that enable us to act. Narratives that break out of prognosticism and thus allow for ambivalences. How do we create inclusive futures that we can orient ourselves by and that make us capable of action? And how do we create an accessible discourse about such futures?
For the publicly funded Foundation for Technology Assessment TA-SWISS, Dezentrum has developed three scenarios of a digital democracy in the year 2050. The result consisted of three speculative objects: a mind-expanding pill, a coin-tossing machine and a shrink-wrapped mushroom risotto. The aim was to make immaterial discourse and different futures tangible in order to create a concrete basis for discussion on issues surrounding social and political coexistence.
In this short talk, I reflect on the participatory and transdisciplinary development of the short stories and artefacts, as well as the public presentation and reception afterwards.
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SPACE AS INTERFACE
We consider design as a narrative connection between two points in space and time. Space is the medium where meanings collide, space is our interface for the experience of reality and its communication. Physical Editing describes a methodology focused on the exploration of these observations and encourages the generation of “physical creative geographies” as intersecting constructs of objects, media, film, objects, performances, etc. as dialogues or narratives propositions. Physical Editing deals with “the reality” required in the construction of fiction as a metaphor for the construction of reality.
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Designing for debate
What if speculative design was a tool capable of supporting democracy, when it stages futures, whose desirability is then open to debate? In this respect, speculative design often follows an aesthetic canon that leads to failure (i.e. artefacts aimed at provocation; shown via exhibitions or mass media). But other strategies need to be developed: 1) using the artefact as a tool for (non-sterile) mutual contestation, 2) beyond the artefact, considering the “public” as a user in its own right, 3) and therefore working on the design of a communication situation where to meet these publics, potentially concerned by the targeted controversy. Such approaches can be brought together in the field of design for debate, they give the designer a role of “diplomat” and are now taught in management schools (at Sciences Po, Paris) and used to accelerate the ecological transition.