Design Fiction/ Speculative Design

25th October 2022

Speculative Design - "A design method addressing big societal problems and looking towards the future."

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby created a book called "Speculative Everything", in which their concern is not to design products for the future but rather to imagine how the future could be different. In the book, they look at designs from around the world to show what these designs could be. We looked at those examples: some which were made for survival (hunting for food using those equipment) and some which are merely necessities (Having a Butter Stick which looks like a glue stick, having a fan attached to the chopsticks so that the noodles won't get hot)

We can use this idea of speculative design not only for the designs that we might have but also for the ideas as well. With that said, we move into our first workshop, which is to create a mood board of our chosen topic, which addresses this sentence:

"We live in a world where <Topic> doesn't exist, no one known about it, it's not in the history books or in the news. No one is talking about it."

So, in my case, I had to create a collage on Chinese Food. However, since we need to find images related to our topic, for my topic it is quite difficult. So I have broaden the topic to "Food" (only for this exercise). This is what I had:

From different newspapers and magazines that we had, some coming from different time periods, I founded different pieces of food and merged them into a collage. There are different sections to this collage: On the left half, we have foods that are normally western style dishes. On the top right quarter, we have drinks, such as yogurt and tea. And finally, on the bottom right quarter, we have Asian food - leaning towards seafood.

What I wanted to show is the large variety of food that we have throughout different cultures and by separating them into different sections, we can differences of ingredients used.

From this workshop, I could collate more ideas from it/ look at things that I did not think of:

In Chinese culture, why they favour seafood - why they would hunt for creatures such as Squid or Sharks.
Tea is also prevalent in the culture as well, search up why
How we cook food is different, using woks instead of the usual pans.

Review

Making Mood Boards/ Collages has helped me thought of ideas that I could look into for research. From them, there are many things that we could look at, such as the general colour that the collages emits, how things are portrayed within the collage, etc.

For speculative design, I can apply that idea to upcoming projects where I need to think about game ideas - what it should look like, how does it play out, what things should be/ not be included. The designs may break the boundaries of being realistic, that we design a certain object to be as complex as possible, even though it may look unpleasing.