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ABSTRACT Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby's new book argues for the value of design projects that speculate about possible futures rather than just realize market-feasible futures. The claim is that our societies, and the industries responsible for furnishing our societies with products and environments, are losing the capacity to envision futures in order to evaluate their desirability. In response, Dunne and Raby, and the designers of which they approve, insist on the importance of speculations being physicalized beyond prototype but no longer (compared to their earlier "critical design" work) deployed for people to use. This review essay is critical of the "shopping" framework and taste regime that underlie Dunne and Raby's arguments and projects.
KEYWORDS: critical design, design Action, design futures, speculative design, taste
It is annoying. Things change because of designers and yet no one could say that we, humans, are designing our future. Samar Akkach has noted that the Arabic for design derives from the term for strong, decisive intent, as in the English phrase "by design" (Akkach 2003). Despite the prominence given to design as a source of innovative value these days, the futures we are getting hardly seem like the ones we explicitly decide on; they are more like the messed-up ones we are drifting unwittingly and implacably into.
While annoying, it is probably not all bad. The current profession of designing has its origins in the very strong intent to future in particular ways known as modernism. In hindsight, this imposing willfulness was a disaster, not least because it was the will of a very select "we."
How then to avoid drifting uncontrollably without resorting to fantasies of control? How to take responsibility for the futures we are designing toward even when we cannot take charge of that designing? How to gather a "we" to do this postmodernist designing?
And where? Ideally, universities are the institutions in our societies with the rare capacity to engage with these questions. However, as Tony Fry and Clive Dilnot have often pointed out, universities until very recently have been profoundly ignorant of design. Design did finally enter the university system at the exact moment that neoliberalism began imposing an audit culture on research productivity. Design was drafted into the academy with the other...