Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

We need to dream new dreams for the twenty-first century as those of the twentieth century rapidly fade. But what role can design play?

other words, design can explore public perceptions of different biofutures before they happen and potentially make a contribution to the design of regulations that ensure the most humane and desirable futures are the most likely to become reality.

the moral philosopher Susan Neiman has pointed out, we should measure reality against ideals, not the other way around: "Ideals are not measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. Reason's task is to deny that the claims of experience are final-and to push us to widen the horizon of our experience by providing ideas that experience ought to obey.

One of the main purposes of conceptual design, therefore, as we see it, is to provide an alternative context to design that is driven entirely by market forces. It is a space for thinking, for trying out ideas, and ideals.

product design remains closely aligned with market expectation and is one of the few areas in which conceptual and commercial approaches really do not mix.

Sometimes we can have more effect as citizens than as designers.

The trouble starts when science moves out of the laboratory into the marketplace, when consumer desire enters the equation and things become more irrational and profit driven.

Ideas of right and wrong are not just abstractions but are entangled in everyday consumer choices.

We need to question these ideas (and ideals) and explore their human consequences once applied on a mass scale to our daily lives. This is where design enters; we can take research happening in laboratories and fastforward to explore possible applications driven by human desire rather than therapeutic need. By facilitating debate on the implications of advanced research in science, design can take on a practical, almost social purpose, and in doing so, play a role in the democratization of technological change by widening participation in debates about future technologies.

weird and wonderful world is taking shape around us.2 Genetics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and neuroscience are all challenging our understanding of nature and suggesting new design possibilities at a level and scale never before possible. If we take just one area, biotechnology, and look more closely, we can see that a revolution is well underway. It is no longer about designing the things in the environment around us but designing life itself from microorganisms to humans, yet as designers we devote very little time to reflecting on what this means.