{"id":22844,"date":"2017-08-25T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2017-08-25T14:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22844"},"modified":"2017-09-14T23:03:41","modified_gmt":"2017-09-15T03:03:41","slug":"fake-or-fiction-part-2-speculative-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/08\/25\/fake-or-fiction-part-2-speculative-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Fake or Fiction? Part 2: Speculative Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nsource<\/em><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Last week<\/a>, I introduced some characters to my argument: Orphan Black<\/i> and its writing and consulting staff, Mr. Robot<\/i> and its creators, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit<\/a> and Nick Land, accelerationism, and hyperstition. Need a refresher? Find it here. Now, I\u2019d like to take a brief detour in order to introduce another important character here: speculative design. <\/span><\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve been in or around the design academy in the past decade, you will no doubt have heard the word \u201cspeculative\u201d thrown around quite a bit. Colloquially, speculative design (or design fiction, or critical design) uses methodology and mediums traditional to the design studio (that is, the division of labor, tools, prototyping, and manufacturing processes common to industrial and graphic design shops) in order to produce visual artifacts from the future. One oft-cited project is the Faraday Chair<\/i><\/a> (1995) designed by Anthony Dunne, erroneously but popularly labeled as the field\u2019s progenitor. Dunne suggested that radio waves carrying wireless communication would eventually crowd our airspace to the point that we would need a physical respite from their electromagnetic effect. As part of his PhD at the Royal College of Art he, with the help of his collaborator Fiona Raby, installed in a gallery a large plexiglass box with an air tube and a pillow and had a model lay inside, supposedly \u201cprotected\u201d from the invisible radiation of wifi and bluetooth messages.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Speculative design, however, is not as new as some will have you think. One of its earlier figures, Krzysztof Wodiczko, grew up in a post war autocratic Poland\u2014an experience that significantly shapes his work. Trained as an industrial designer, Wodiczko began his career working for a small Polish electronics manufacturer, but quickly turned to his design education as a means to develop pieces which \u201ccould interrogate ethical and political voicelessness\u201d (102<\/a>). It was in this vein that he designed and fabricated the Personal Instrument<\/i><\/a> (1969), featuring a mic\u2019d up helmet, sound-canceling headphones, and two gloves with light sensors. As the wearer reduces how much light hits the sensors on their hands, sounds from their immediate environment are blocked out and vice versa. About the piece, Wodiczko writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

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I was in a strange position: a designer employed by the state industrial corporation while trying to establish a critical and ironic dialogue with a real and monstrous designer\u2014the communist state itself\u2014who was in total control of the entire society and treated it as a single work of art or design\u2026In the Personal Instrument<\/i>, I somehow represented myself, my colleagues, and possibly many others, swimming \u201cfreely\u201d in a world of sounds and speech, yet remaining silent. (102)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Eventually, Wodiczko labeled his flavor of design \u201cinterrogative\u201d and in 1994 he penned a manifesto of sorts. In it, he declares that interrogative design \u201ctakes a risk, explores, articulates, and [responds] to the questionable conditions of life in today\u2019s world, and does so in a questioning manner\u201d (16). One of Wodiczko\u2019s more well-known pieces, Homeless Vehicle Project<\/i> (1988\u201389), was designed in consultation with homeless individuals in and around Philadelphia and New York City. The piece features a rolling cart, complete with aluminum can storage, sleeping cubby, and safety flag to make sure its presence is known from afar. The artist created the Homeless Vehicle<\/i> <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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in the context of jungle capitalism, along streets and parks of New York City\u2026[where] the petrified homeless, dying of their wounds or of malnutrition were advocating the benefits of American freedom in front of monuments of Washington and Lafayette, thus revivifying and reanimating these former dead. (xiv<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When asked about its viability as a mass-produced vehicle, Wodiczko leans on<\/a> the value of a prototype:<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cThe minute you present a proposal, people think you must be offering a grand vision for a better future.\u201d They can\u2019t see a thing like the Homeless Vehicle<\/i>\u2026as the \u201cconcretisation\u201d of a present problem, a makeshift transitional device, or an aesthetic experiment. Instead, \u201cthey think it must be designed for mass production\u2026taking over the cities.\u201d (Wright 1992, 272-273)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In effect, the \u201cpeople\u201d want to know if it\u2019s real. Wodiczko argues it need not be.<\/span><\/p>\n

I return, then, to last week\u2019s post<\/a> and Delphi Carstens on hyperstitions: \u201cthe trauma and fear engendered by their cultural \u2018makeovers\u2019\u2026merely serve to further empower [their] basic premises and fan the flames.\u201d Surely, seeing Faraday Chair<\/i> in a gallery in 1995, complete with model and pillow and breathing tube, a viewer understands it is a piece of critical design (or is it art at this point?). Having read the plaque, our gallery visitor walks away considering the health risks of an inevitable flood of electromagnetic waves into their apartment (remember, this is well before \u201cwifi\u201d or \u201cAirPort\u201d or \u201cBluetooth\u201d became household names). Walking out of the gallery and into the street, however, does a passing Homeless Vehicle<\/i> engender in our viewer a sense of anxiety for the homeless it proposes to serve? Or, seeing a working prototype in use, do they feel a sense of relief that a \u201csolution\u201d to the homeless \u201cproblem\u201d is available, relinquishing them of any obligation to do their part?<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing this now, I feel a sense of crisis. Dunne and Raby<\/a>, having popularized the field of speculative\/critical design by making it a central focus of the now defunct Design Interaction program at RCA, have been busy preparing visions<\/a>\u00a0of future western cultures, visions bereft of refugees but complete with \u201cAnarcho-evolutionists\u201d and \u201cCommuno-nuclearists\u201d. Wodiczko has been using high-powered projectors to cover monuments and buildings around the world with the recorded stories of members of marginalized communities such as women factory workers in Mexico<\/a> or US war\u00a0veterans<\/a>. Certainly, I don\u2019t wish to suggest that the Polish artist is any sort of martyr\u2014he develops his work while on the Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty payroll<\/a>. But I do very much want to love his methodology\u2014one that he argues \u201cattempts to heal the numbness that threatens the health of democratic process by pinching and disrupting it, waking it up, and inserting the voice, experiences, and presence of those others who have been silenced, alienated, and marginalized\u201d (xiii<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Are Dunne and Raby trying to \u201cheal\u201d anything? They suggest that by identifying a current sociotechnical trajectory and trying to plot its future through the creation of material artifacts that present the audience with that future, they can provoke discourse on the desirability of that future. You can see, then, why our old friends, the accelerationists would prefer this methodology\u2014especially those on the left, who see projects such as Occupy and the Arab Spring as having failed in their very un-futuristic shortsightedness. So instead of trying to figure out who gets to sleep in the warm tents once the snow comes, I guess it\u2019s better to forget about sleeping altogether and just leaning into our four hour work week to build systems of automation that will most certainly save us from late capital\u2019s technocratic grip? <\/span><\/p>\n

Where are we left then? If we envision projects to address homelessness today, we are absolved of needing to worry about it tomorrow. If, instead, we envision what homelessness looks like tomorrow, then we need not worry about today\u2014our hyperstitious ways will materialize the answers. Our real projects are fake, so we must rely on our fictions?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you\u2019ll allow me to return to television (warning: spoilers ahead, tread lightly<\/em>), consider that all of the accelerationist projects and hyperstitious speculative design pieces being extruded slowly through the 3D printers and from the laser cutters of the shiny new \u201cmakerspaces\u201d of\u00a0 <\/span>otherwise underfunded art and design departments are not in the service of dismantling heavily capitalized corporate cloning projects or bringing down the E-Corps of meat space. At first blush, this makes perfect sense. Firstly, we mustn\u2019t upset the backers of said spaces. Secondly, and perhaps more obviously (absurdly?), there isn\u2019t<\/i> a heavily capitalized corporate cloning project, nor is there a Sino-American conspiracy involving multinational corporations, cryptocurrency, and a Swedish executive-cum-hacker (and if you believe there is, you must obviously sleep with a tinfoil hat on your head).<\/span><\/p>\n

At this point, I\u2019ve brought you with me down a big of a rabbit hole. There are questions of scale (are we fixing capitalism or cloning?) and medium (metal, Photoshop, or television? Maybe all three?) and channel (gallery, street, or BBC America?) and more. So in my next post, let\u2019s see if I can\u2019t wrap this up and finally start to answer the questions I posed at the beginning of last week\u2019s piece: when is fiction too fake, reality too real?<\/span><\/p>\n

Gabi Schaffzin<\/a> is a PhD student\u00a0at UC San Diego. Anthony Dunne thought his work was all a big hoax. Krzysztof Wodiczko thought his work was too ironic. He was rejected from a PhD with the former (fortunately) and a job with the latter (disappointingly).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

source Last week, I introduced some characters to my argument: Orphan Black and its writing and consulting staff, Mr. Robot and its creators, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and Nick Land, accelerationism, and hyperstition. Need a refresher? Find it here. Now, I\u2019d like to take a brief detour in order to introduce another important character […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Fake or Fiction? Part 2: Speculative Design by @GabiSchaffzin","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[323,892,10382],"tags":[97193,36424,971,97198,97192,97203,36428,97200,97189,97188,97199,97190,17583,97197],"class_list":["post-22844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-essay","category-fiction","tag-accelerationism","tag-art","tag-design","tag-dunne","tag-fake","tag-fake-or-fiction","tag-fiction","tag-interrogative-design","tag-mr-robot","tag-orphan-black","tag-raby","tag-speculative-design","tag-tv","tag-wodiczko"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2071"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22844"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22849,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22844\/revisions\/22849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}