Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

8. Between Reality and the Impossible

139 BETWEEN REALITY AND THE IMPOSSIBLE 8 . B E Tw E En REAL I T Y AnD TH E IM P Oss I B L E Speculative designs depend on dissemination and engagement with a public or expert audience; they are designed to circulate. The usual channels are exhibitions, publications, press, and the Internet. Each channel or medium creates its own issues of accessibility, elitism, populism, sophistication, audience, and so on. This need for dissemination means speculative designs have to be striking but a danger is they end up being little more than visual icons for communicating an idea, in an instant. The best speculative designs do more than communicate; they suggest possible uses, interactions, and behaviors not always obvious at a quick glance. 9808.indb 139 9/23/13 5:49 PM 140 CHAPTER 8 concePtuAl WindoW SHoPPerS So far, the exhibition has been the main platform for us. Although projects might have developed in different contexts, the exhibition serves as a form of reporting space for presenting the results of research and experimentation. Design exhibitions usually show existing products, survey historical movements, or celebrate heroes and superstars but they could also serve other purposes; they could function as spaces for critical reflection. Collections such as those of the Wellcome Trust, Pitt Rivers Museum, or London Museum hold everyday objects from distant societies, either in time or geography. When we see a strange shoe or ritualistic object we wonder what kind of society must have produced it, how it was structured, what values, beliefs, and dreams motivated it, if it was wealthy or poor. We enact a form of window shopping, trying things out in our minds. It requires imaginative effort but it also provides scope for individual interpretation. If, rather than looking back in time, we presented people with fictional artifacts from alternative versions of our own society or its possible future, would people begin to relate to them in the same way—a sort of speculative material culture, fictional archeology, or imaginary anthropology? For many designers, there is a natural tendency to view museums and galleries in a negative light as inaccessible and elitist places to show design. But today, there are many different kinds of museums and galleries, each serving different purposes and catering to different audiences—specialist design museums, science museums, national museums, regional art centers, private galleries—each offering very different opportunities for designers and the public. Early on, we did everything we could to avoid exhibiting work in a white cube and everything it stood for. We showed in shop windows, homes, shopping centers, cafés, gardens. But always, the work became about the space itself, or the context, rather than the ideas we wished to explore. Slowly, we began to view museums and galleries as experimental spaces, test sites, places for reporting back on our experiments and sharing the results, sometimes with designers, sometimes with broader publics. They can complement other media channels, offering more aesthetic, intimate, unmediated, and contemplative forms of engagement with issues and ideas. Since the early 2000s, the number of channels for disseminating designs through different media has exploded: from exhibitions and magazine reviews to YouTube and vimeo channels, Twitter, personal websites, blogs, and so on. Hiromi Ozaki’s Menstruation Machine: Takashi’s Take was first exhibited in the 9808.indb 140 9/23/13 5:49 PM 141 BETWEEN REALITY AND THE IMPOSSIBLE RCA degree show in 2010, which had twenty thousand visitors. It was picked up by Wired online and after this appeared on many specialized technology and media art blogs where it was discussed and critiqued in some depth. It was extensively tweeted and began to receive major but superficial exposure, often oversimplified and sensationalized. After appearing as an artwork in an exhibition at the Tokyo Museum of Art, it was covered in newspapers, art magazines, books, and catalogs. In 2011 it was shown in the Talk to Me exhibition at MoMA as design. In this setting it challenged designers and professionals as much as the public. All this time it also existed as a YouTube video aimed at teenagers. 1 From its first showing at the RCA as a student project it consistently moved from high to low culture, from pop to niche, through art, design, and technology contexts. Throughout the project, the designer made full use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook not only to promote the project but...