Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.

Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything , Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be--to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).

Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more--about everything--reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Dunne (Royal College of Art, London) and Raby (Univ. of Applied Arts, Vienna) offer a provocative survey of "speculative design" that explores the world of possible and plausible desired futures. Here one finds design products that act as metaphors to critique, provoke, and reflect on the world as it exists today. A crossing of science fiction, conceptual art, and social engineering, this work triggers questions about "the good" while causing readers to consider the relationship between people and the objects embedded in their lives. Chapters range from "Beyond Radical Design" to "Design as Critique" to "Aesthetics of Unreality." This is not exactly a "futurist" book, because it does not really predict or promote particular eventualities; rather, it introduces readers to artists and designers whose work challenges existing conditions and who exalt in the imaginative "what if" questions. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. Skaggs University of Louisville