SPECULATIVE DESIGN
“Once designers step away from industrial production and the marketplace we
enter the realm of the unreal, the fictional, or what we prefer to think of as
conceptual design—design about ideas. It has a short but rich history and it is
a place where many interconnected and not very well understood forms of
design happen—speculative design,
critical design,
design fiction,
design
futures,
antidesign, radical design, interrogative design,
design for
debate, adversarial design,
discursive design,
futurescaping,
and some
design art.”
- Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
- Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Traditional design is focused on problem solving and following a central idea. Speculative design is the relm between art and design which challenges ideas now with a vision of a future world. Many of the designs that come out of speculative design act as props, but support a main idea that creates a statement. By designing for the future, these products allow questions and conversations to come into play about how we see our present. Speculative designers create to unsettle the present and not predict the future, provoke and pose questions, shift from design applications to design implications, and ask “what if” questions. By creating a signal and scenario through fashion, furniture, graphics, robots, or stories, designers can critique the ideas of today.