On Speculative Design

 "I love you, but you are not serious people." — Logan Roy, Succession

As an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania, our first assignment was to design a crossing over the Wissahickon River. I was a transfer student from the Rhode Island School of Design. Always a bit of a weirdo, I didn't make a bridge or any typical structure. I thought there were already enough bridges over the Wissahickon. My design solution was to plant a line of silver maples through the area on both sides of the river, so that when the wind blew, there would be a visual crossing of silver connecting both sides of the river. Now I think I was a speculative designer without knowing it. Maybe I was even critiquing the design brief. If I had known about speculative design maybe my life would have been different.

In those early years, under the tutelage of Bilge Friedlander and Denis Playdon, I was allowed to make my own form of design. They encouraged imagination and the opening of new perspectives. We were allowed to create spaces for discussion, and even to shake up the design prompt. I wanted to make weird, innovative, even ugly things. The only field that seemed to embrace that kind of thinking was set design. I wish I had known there was this whole other world where I could have been imagining the sounds of woolly mammoths by investigating elephants. The things I care about have always existed in the imaginal space. I can imagine a whole different Nya, with a PhD, making crazy things, "talking about talking" in some cozy design school or practice. Instead, I worked for big corporations trying to please studio execs with sets that weren't funny, cheap, sophisticated, whatever enough. Who knew there was another way.

Dunne & Raby write about dreams being downgraded to hopes that the dreams of the twentieth century have been revealed as unsustainable. But whose dreams are they talking about, as they jet-set from place to place living their very interesting lives in London and now in New York, making absurd, dark, plausible, preferable, imaginary, critical things.

I have studied a lot about dreams, and I prefer the framework of Stephen Aizenstat, with whom I've studied in the Dream Tending program at Pacifica. Aizenstat's approach invites us to experience dreams through four interrelated dimensions: the personal, interpersonal, world, and mythic. The world and mythical dimension I think relate and could even expand speculative design. If, as Aizenstat suggests, we recognize that dreams are not only individual but also expressions of the anima mundi, the soul of the world. The Dream of the Planet offers us ecological insight and connection. Finally, the mythic or archetypal mode links personal and collective imagination, showing how dream images participate in timeless stories and sacred patterns that shape culture and consciousness. I don't believe these types of dreams can be downgraded. We just aren't listening to them. Maybe as some are speculating about joyfully, Mother Earth is begging for an audience.

The authors talk about not giving up. They write, "Rather than giving up altogether, there are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could be — speculative design." I appreciate the idea of the future cone fanning out. Perhaps I've become too rigid and should allow myself to inhabit:

Probable futures

Plausible futures

Possible futures

Fantasies of fairy tales, superheroes, and space operas

Preferable futures

Imaginary futures

Because I am female, Black, and Jewish, I look at the world through the lens of oppression, and I actually like to be confirmed in that awareness. If I have to inhabit a fairy tale I think I prefer to live in a story penned by the Brothers Grimm, like The Red Shoes where Karen’s feet are cut off by the executioner, or The Little Match Girl who freezes to death when no one buys her matches.

I was talking to my friend and collaborator Sarah today about how I feel like I'm post-sustainability or perhaps an existential post-environmentalist. My work now is about climate anxiety, eco-grief, and solastalgia. Speculative designers often carry an optimism and arrogance that I feel I've lost. I will no longer design a silver maple crossing.  I now only long to put my feet in the water and listen to the river. But in a way, my Solastalgia Project acts as a critique of sustainability by challenging its timelines and highlighting how climate futures are increasingly catastrophic.

The pessimist in me wonders if the authors will go on giving lectures and speculating about the future while living their best lives as the planet falls into oblivion. But perhaps they'll be on Mars with Elon, wearing their statistical wrist watches. It just seems like they have those kinds of connections.