Future Thieving #1 Stealing from the future with speculative design UX Collective

Table Of Content

• Akon City
• Stop guessing about your digital experience with LogRocket
• Design Practice for the 21st Century or a New Utopia?
• Column: It’s not just RFK Jr.: Biden faces serious danger from third-party candidates
• A HISTORY OF RADICAL FUTURING IN BLACK COMMUNITIES
• Speculative — Post-Design Practice or New Utopia?

Not if you consider the fact that the WIPP will remain dangerous to human lives for 10,000 years. That’s the issue designers and scientists are grappling with as they figure out how to handle the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico—the United State’s only underground radioactive waste repository. Outside of fighting Klingons and going where no man had gone before, the show was chock-full of ideas and concepts that have had a deep influence on tech designs today.

Akon City

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'second sun' sailboat concept is made of algae-based biopolymer + ocean plastic.

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It's not hard to imagine a demo of a popular chatbot like ChatGPT (because you know there's no way Apple's putting Google Gemini up on stage) running locally on an M4 MacBook, with an emphasis on how that can afford you increased privacy and security. In this same world, we are bombarded by comparisons to people with higher and lower social ratings, the concept of privacy ceases to exist when everybody knows us by name, and gaps in economic inequality becomes magnified. In an episode titled Nose Dive (2016), we are introduced to a world where every interaction we have with others is rated by them on a 5-star scale review, where our average rating affects our socioeconomic status and our access to public and private services. There are multiple online tools that can be used to create 3D objects, narratives, maps, communication and more. If we look at all the word clouds, and compare the results, it is possible to describe the principal focuses of the different “families” of Speculative Design practitioners, or, at least, their focuses on how they express them in their interviews, i.e. the way in which they represent themselves in public communication.

Stop guessing about your digital experience with LogRocket

User experience design (UX design in short), utilizes practices that intersect those found in psychology, sociology, and behavioral sciences to study and understand the human condition and context of a given business goal. This human-centric approach makes UX designers valuable to organizations that want to make sure their products answer real consumer pains and values. Major tech companies today understand the value of design, as they employ more and more designers into progressively strategic and business-critical roles to help connect complex technologies to everyday people.

Design Practice for the 21st Century or a New Utopia?

Womack lifts up musician and physicist Stephon Alexander's TED talk about how jazz legend John Coltrane's song “Giant Steps” was an aural and physical diagram of Einstein's Theory of Relativity [93]. The power of music is amplified in Afrofuturist offerings and the stories behind and within these offerings can open and inform design speculation imaginations. Speculative design encourages us to push the boundaries of creativity by moving away from conventional assumptions and safe thinking. This shift of perspective and constant wondering of “what if” can refresh the design process. You can also diversify your perspective and collaborate with experts from various fields, such as science, sociology, economics, and psychology. Their insights can enrich the process by providing different lenses through which to view alternative futures.

Imaginary worlds are an exceptional source of inspiration to designers in their re-thinking of the future. However, such approaches to speculative fiction, as conceptualized, for instance, by the science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling, are often part of the technological paradigm, and, as such, reaffirm the technological progress instead of questioning or being critical of it. By the creation of imaginary worlds, and by designing fictions, we actually question the world we live in its values, functions, its metabolism, as well as the expectations of its inhabitants. Speculative design triggers the debate about the actions we take today (in the present) that build future events. It questions technology at early stages; it is concerned with the domestication of technology and upstream engagement. It questions the role of industrial and product design in delivering new science and technology.[2] Speculative design as a subsidiary of critical design is built on the fundamentals Frankfurt school of criticism.

If a particular feature or design solution is too far removed from reality, it will be incredibly hard to create and implement. For example, if you’re designing a hotel room in the year 2030, you can’t design it to be some futuristic space that uses no technology that exists in the present day. You have to imagine what the room would look like if we were able to create an entirely new hotel experience without any limitations. Regarding digital technologies more specifically, such endeavor is important because it helps to show how the use of such devices is a joint construction between designers and users. Some of the gestures we describe here indeed emerged from people’s everyday practices, either from a naïve perspective (lifting up one’s finger in a cell phone conversation to have better signal) or because they’re simply more practical (watching a movie in bed with the laptop shifted).

In this chapter we analyze the rhetorical work of speculative design methods to advance third wave agendas in HCI. Our argument is that third wave, critically oriented, speculative design “works” in HCI because it is highly compatible with other forms of conventional corporate speculation (e.g. concept videos and scenario planning). This reading of speculative design re-centers the “criticality” from the method itself to its ability to advance agendas that challenge dominant practices in technology design. We will look at how practitioners trade on the rhetorical ambiguity of future oriented design practices to introduce these ideas in contexts where they may not otherwise have much purchase. Our chapter concludes with a call for critically oriented practitioners in this space to share their experiences navigating speculative design ambiguity and to document the disciplinary history of the method’s development.

Many tools that practitioners and educators use for Speculative Design come in the form of lists of items that facilitate building and exploring future scenarios. For example by describing the forms in which Design Fictions can be created, or by providing lists of probable future predictions that enable designers to have a sense of what may happen in the future. Speculative design encourages product designers to transition from a purely tactical approach to a more strategic one.

They frequently include humour, often of the dark variety, close to satire, which activates the audience on an emotional and intellectual level, in a way similar to literature and film. Speculative scenarios are often unusual, curious, occasionally even disturbing, but desirable and attractive to the audience. However, only concepts that successfully communicate with the suspension of disbelief, actually provoke attention, emotions, and stimulate thinking and discussion, which, after all, is the main goal of speculative practice.

All these disciplines can be united in an attempt to take a look beyond the current state of things and focus on modeling preferable realities. And speculative design is interested specifically in future consequences and implications of the relationship between science, technology, and humans. It is easy to see these projects as works of art, or even science fiction, but it is very important to know that speculative design is definitively not art. As art, the criticality of its messages can too easily be dismissed as fiction and fantasy.

An astute observer, Perec found inspiration in situations, gestures and habits that we often overlook or miss. Using the prefix “infra-”, he highlighted the importance of what is underneath or hidden and which could be uncovered as an interrogation of the quotidian. How would the architecture of homes change when families become more multi-generational? What are the financial implications of age, if retirement is still marked at age 60?

For this we could say that these sentences define a style, an attitude, a philosophy, which can be declined into a number of different types of practices, roughly isomorphic to the various names of design practices with a speculative connotation. In the SpeculativeEdu project, we have tried to gather together a wider understanding of how designers and other practitioners use Speculative Design techniques in order to compose future scenarios. On top of that, we have reflected on how these techniques can be introduced in education processes and paths to trigger ethical, critical, innovative designs which are able to bring together different publics in participatory ways. In order to expand the exhibition, we tried to answer the question through a series of interviews with the authors of the presented works together with the prominent international practitioners in the filed of speculative design. We have also incorporated a discoursive view of the eminent experts in the field of speculative (and general contemporary) design practice. Speculative design is not exactly a design we are used to — it doesn’t focus on actual problem solving.

Bobby Berk Explains Why He's Really Leaving 'Queer Eye' - Vanity Fair

Bobby Berk Explains Why He's Really Leaving 'Queer Eye'.

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Therefore, critical thinking is an essential aspect of speculative design.[14] Critiquing norms, values and why we design is what motivates speculative designers. Like the pioneers of Speculative Design, many first-wave practitioners today are shifting priorities from futures to realities. (J. Paul Neeley’s thoughts on expanding Dunne & Raby’s a/b list are a good example.) They increasingly seek to go beyond “sparking discussions” to embracing action, through projects that address urgent issues such as climate change, migration, and social justice. Rather than simply speculating on emerging technologies, these designers consider what aspects of their speculations can be transformed into actions in the present. New perspectives are also being opened up by practitioners working outside as well as inside the established boundaries of Speculative Design, drawing on certain elements and blending them with aspects of other approaches. Since speculative design continuously interacts with other related practices, fields and disciplines, it uses any methodology that is accessible and appropriate at any given moment.