Design is also the means by which pathological relationships to material culture are made more efficient and more delightful, and we are worse for it. Some may even conclude that the job of Design in the 21st century is to undo (much of) the Design of 20th. It may also be to re-claim and re-launch other frustrated Modern impulses that were dry-docked by century’s end, not only designing things —widgets, withdrawn objects, manifest subjectivities, formal forms, etc.— but also designing the relations between them: systems, supply-chains, encounters, obligations, accounting protocols, and so on.
As an alternative perspective, speculation is not ephemeral or disengaged. The prevalence of models for risk patterns, ideal options, and plotted-outcomes underscores that speculation itself is not a supplemental or marginal process. It is less “airy-fairy” than it is nuts and bolts: whether for commodities and equities futures, automated A/B testing, enterprise reinsurance or weather forecasting, the global economy functions by speculative models of the near or long-term future.
But if so does this disqualify the speculative from the figuring of fundamental alternatives? It does not. Instead of concluding that the future (and futurism per se) is lost it we should commandeer modeling infrastructures for better and more vibrant purposes. For this, speculative models are rotated from one purpose to another: less to predict what is most likely to happen (deriving value from advance simulation of given outcomes) than to search the space of actual possibility (even and especially beyond what any of us would conceive otherwise.) That is, predictive models are adaptive because they need to be descriptive, but for speculation, models are prescriptive because they need to become normative. Between them we track different uses for contingency, imminence, simulation, navigation, resistance, governmentality, universality, neutrality, etc.That is where Design becomes designation.
For obvious reasons it is commonly presumed that there must be an overlap between SD and the more general pursuit of Design Futures, or prototypes from the worlds of tomorrow. Sometimes there are clear alignments, especially for SD projects that address “the future” explicitly as critical subject matter. As I put it elsewhere, in our culture speaking about “the future” is a way of saying things about the present—critical, utopian, projective, pragmatic and/or simply unspeakable things—but too often it is an alibi for saying nothing at all.
Given this, we may expect a more intellectually and politically rigorous SD to resist—or even eliminate—futurity as a key concept or site condition. Some might insist that it focus instead on the most immediate at-hand frames of spatial and temporal reference, and to deal with coming conditions largely through the hard or soft survivalist aesthetics that ensue. “There is no time, and there is only this place” may be the rationale for this emergency interventionism. Others lament that facts on the ground are out-of-sync with fragmented social history. They hint that until recent times sociological “cognitive maps,” on the one hand, and systemic historical unfolding, on the other, may have been in conflict but at least their common ground felt solid. For this perspective, the answer to the malaise of network culture is to re-glue the scale and tempo of global forces back to the dialectic parameters of social and psychological history.
In such a matrix, each temporal scale has its own version of “the future” and some are more interesting to SD than others. There is a social future, with an attendant duration measured in fashion cycles or communal memory of place; a technical future, with its cycles of product SKU turnover and mechanic evolution; a historical future, with trans-generational undulations of friend and enemy, capture and memorialization; and a geologic future, with ripples and rhythms that span far longer than the genomic coherency of any apex species.
Any affective sense of order by which each of these futural forms may be felt to be in special harmony (geologic future in sync with social future, historical future in sync with technological future, etc.) is surely not an organic state but a broken sophistic illusion. In other words, it takes a special kind of anthropocentric naiveté to fully entertain the idea that making all design “human scale” would be a long-term solution to anything but the most pedestrian problems.The futures that are probably most worth designing are those that exceed human phenomenology’s intuitive scales of anatomically-embedded spatial navigation and the temporalities of organism life span.