"Faced with huge challenges such as overpopulation, water shortages, and climate change, designers feel an overpowering urge to work together to fix them".
- Are designers the ones who really fix the issues the world faces?
- Can the human population come together as a whole to get behind an event or idea spontaneously, or do they always need someone to curate or shed light on an event first?
- What if designers didn't want to work on these issues, would the human world be totally screwed?
- Who is a designer in this instance? When Bob decides to not wash his car to save water for the planet is he a designer?
Speculative design is described as design that uses imagination and aims to open new perspectives on issues, alternative ways of being, and to encourage discussion and redefining relationships to reality.
- How far is too far fro speculative design? Is there such a thing?
- Would designing and presenting a city on Mars of even a different solar system be reasonable or helpful for the current situation or time period?
- What about speculating on past design work? Could throwing around what if scenarios help create more speculative design? For example, "what if I changed ____ aspect about my work and did this instead, how would it change the discussion about the work?
Mars One Settlement Bryan Versteeg
The fictional nature requires viewers to suspend their disbelief and allow their imaginations to wonder. Futures at not a destination, but a medium to aid in thought.
- Kid's play, they have no idea what things are used for so they use it in their own imaginative way
- How can you break the boundaries of being tied to your previous knowledge about how things work or what they are in order to be more imaginative about things?
https://www.ted.com/talks/jay_silver_hack_a_banana_make_a_keyboard?language=en
Designers should not define futures for everyone else but working with experts ... generate futures that act as catalysts for public debate and discussion about the kinds of future people really want.
- Would you be considered a designer then, or someone who just organizes information and needs from other people?
- At what point to do you as a designer over-ride people's request and build or design something, based on your own research, you know will be successful.
- What is the difference then between a designer and someone who designs something based on the wants of people around them? Would my neighbor be a designer if he made something that our apartment complex said they wanted, even though he had no prior experience in building or making, or interactive pieces?
Frank Lloyd Wright, Future City
Le Corbusier, Future City
- These two architects built future cities they imaged for people, based on their own personal bias and wants. Are they still designers since they didn't really collaborate with any experts in ethics, scientists, economists, etc.?
Physical Fiction 99% Invisible: Ten Thousand Years Podcast
The design system and ideas revolving around WIPP had to communicate the potential dangers of coming in contact with the radioactive material to people 10,000 years from now.
- Does design need to do it's job 100%? What if only 2 or 3 people died out of 100. 97 people are still alive. The signs and visual communication that may have been left behind by the initial designers can now be associated with people dying or bad things, so the signs are now effective in communicating, at the expense of 2 or 3 people.
Landscape Architect Mike Brill came up with a visual communication system that was actually determined to change the landscape into something that visually looked dangerous. Something that a person would understand as dangerous just based on the characteristics created. In the end this idea wasn't chosen due to the fact that it might become an attraction in itself and invite people to explore it.
- Why is there a human instinct to conquer everything? Why do we have to be dominant, can't we just let something be, why is always knowing such a staple from century to century?
Mike Brill, Landscape of Thorns
The constant and most durable thing that people have noted to be consistent over time is culture: the folklore cat song (Ray Cat) to help people realize when they were near dangerous substance.
- If the folklore song is in English, and people would still understand the meaning of english in 10,000 years because they can understand this song, they why not just write the dangerous warning information in English around the complex? Is the idea that this folklore will keep language consistent enough where people can still read and understand our dangerous warning signs.
Trevor Paglen "Last Pictures" https://vimeo.com/53655801
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