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Abstract:
This essay attempts to come to a philosophical understanding of the ethical provocation of speculation as evident in design. I argue that speculative design is a material practice of ethical creative coexistence and present three features of speculative philosophy that manifest in the design and use of two design examples: the Starbuck's coffee cup and Marti Guixe's design project, Solar Kitchen Restaurant in La Pin Kulta (2011). The philosophical interpretation relies on object-oriented works of Ian Bogost, Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett and their shared insistence on recognized non-identity.
In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, And Social Dreaming, designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby reassure us that, "the purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than predict the future."1 Their work and the work of other speculative designers drive design beyond attend to the agency of material, to the process of making, to the demand of things on us, and most importantly to design as a critical practice of questioning ourselves through our things. Extending Dunne and Raby's call to projection into alternate possibilities, I argue that speculative design is a material practice of ethical creative coexistence as distinct from standardized, industrial design solutions. Simply put, speculative design makes us think beyond ourselves and fosters the ethical comportment of recognized non-identity resistant to instrumentalization.
My argument stems from the 21st century need to confront wasteful and thoughtless overconsumption and related social, political and environmental abuses fueled by a need to control and master, natural and artificial goods, as well as socio-economic identity. In particular, design in uniformity, to focus on human comfort and to market products as singular, isolated machines of natural resources, technological advancements and synthetic materials speculative practices utilize an object oriented perspective of coexistence and ask how can we design beyond our own needs?
The conceptual path of my argument relies on the speculative philosophical approaches of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter and her attention to the agency of things, Timothy Morton's Realist Magic and his celebration of object opacity, and Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology and his strategies to enact an object orientation. 2 These philosophers offer alternatives to user-centric instrumental thinking in service of efficiency and commercial dominance by fundamentally challenging our relationship with things in the world....