Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.

Anthony Dunne & Fiona

Raby, MIT Press, 2013. 200 pp., 143 col. illus, cloth, $29.95. ISBN: 9780262019842.

Review by Susan Yelavich, Associate Professor, Director, MA Design Studies, Parsons

The New School for Design

In a time of dire pronouncements about design’s deleterious affects on the planet’s health,

when designers are urged to take actions ranging from not designing at all to retrofitting

global infrastructures, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby offer a very different kind of

therapy for a profession under fire. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social

Dreaming argues for the vital importance of creating objects that function as questions, as

protagonists in social fictions. Dunne and Raby’s book features projects made to

underscore the point that the future is fabricated and built, and that the future could be

otherwise, if its designers envisioned alternatives. Collectively, the scenarios and artifacts

in Speculative Everything are the design equivalent of the editorial. Independently, each

offers a compelling critique of our relations to, and expectations of, the constellations of

the animate and inanimate things, from the body to the body politic, that are increasingly

manipulated by design—be it in the marketplace or the laboratory.

To substantiate their case for critical speculation, Dunne and Raby place their fictions

within a larger genre of utopian and dystopian futures—and herein lies the paradox.

Utopias and dystopias cannot exist, but design must exist. Reconciling fiction and non-

fiction is the challenge, because Speculative Everything is ultimately a work of non-

fiction.

1
In fact, were it not driven by a larger concern for social well being, Speculative

Everything could be read as a vanity project—a compendium of a roughly decade’s of

work to come out of Dunne and Raby’s practice and that of their students at London’s

Royal College of Art. After all, their projects and their protégés’ dominate seven of the

book’s nine chapters. Even the first two chapters—offering context in fashion,

architecture, fine art, film, literature, and graphics—only seem to strengthen the

perception that speculative design is new mode of practice. Apart from exceptions like

Norman Bel Geddes Airliner No. 4 (1929), Luigi Colani’s Passenger Aircraft (1977), and

Daniel Weil’s Radio in a Bag (1982), Dunne and Raby position this work as virtually sui

generis within design.

But even the designers included in Speculative Everything operate within history. It is a

matter of how that history is defined. Speculative design qualifies as a distinct break only

if viewed within the framework of professional practice. But what of pop phenomena

such as chindōgu? (Chindōgu are absurd tools and the subject of Kenji Kawakami and

Dan Papia’s 1995 book 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: the Art of Chindōgu.) Even

though chindōgu are more novelty than product design, they share a sense of humor and

surprise with the work in Speculative Everything. A chindōgu hat of cameras for

panorama shots doesn’t seem that far from Superflux’s mask-like headdress for the

visually impaired.

But the work in Speculative Everything is more decidedly cautionary than chindōgu. It

offers bizarre designerly prophecies of what might be if we don’t abandon our ways. In

this sense, the visions offered by Dunne and Raby have more in common with Jeremy

Bentham’s Panopticon, which did engender a reality, albeit, punitive. One almost wishes

2
the authors had identified other such speculations as part of their pedigree, speculations

done before the industrial revolution and the so-called beginnings of design.

(Renaissance grotesques, gothic gargoyles, and other evocations of mutation, deformity,

and vulnerability come to mind.) However, expanding the parameters of design history is

not Dunne and Raby’s intent. Twenty-first century design is their object and subject—as

a means of questioning the technological assumptions (i.e., designs) upon which our

futures are predicated. As the authors write in their opening chapter:

Design can give experts permission to let their imaginations flow freely, give
material expression to the insights generated, ground these imaginings in
everyday situations and provide platforms for further collaborative speculation.
(p. 6)
This claim raises two issues, the first to do with “design.” The argument that designers

have special purchase on the material realities they choose to reconfigure is central to

their Dunne and Raby’s thesis and their pedagogy. It is their strength and weakness. The

audience for the book is designers, yet Speculative Everything is a critique of the willful

ignorance of a market-driven society—an audience the authors are unlikely to reach. We

can blame publishing constraints that force categorization; but that moves us no closer to

securing a role for the designer as a public intellectual. This is especially unfortunate in

this case, as the strong suit of Dunne and Raby’s thinking is its absence of design

parochialism. They are truly literate.

The second and related concern has to do with the word “experts”—the “…ethicists,

political scientists, economists, and so on…” (p. 6). There is unquestionable value in

working with high-level thinkers, shakers, and makers, in what the authors describe as the

“privileged spaces of conceptual design” (p. 34). The drawback is that the conversation is

3
only accessible to the cognoscenti. Even scatological pieces like Sputniko’s

Menstruation Machine (2010) are not fully legible without the accompanying description.

The same is often true for the authors’ own work. As an image, Needy Robot from

Technological Dreams No. 1: Robots (2007) is poetically mysterious; as a video, the

piece seems even more obscure as portrait of emotional bonding between a person and a

machine.

Dunne and Raby have worked hard to get out of this double bind between expert and

non-expert. They write:

Early on, we did everything we could to avoid exhibition work in a white cube,
and everything it stood for. We showed in shop windows, homes, shopping
centers, cafes, gardens. But always the work became about the space itself, or the
context rather than the ideas we wished to explore. (p. 140)
They concluded that museums and galleries “offer more contemplative forms of

engagement with issues and ideas” (p.140). In offering work for “contemplation,” they

align themselves with literature and art—a visceral type of literature and art that make

contemplation less passive. (Think Meret Oppenhieim’s fur-lined tea cup, 1936.)

The science museum, however, offers a different kind of context, which Dunne and Raby

have used to success on numerous occasions, as they did in Dublin’s Science Gallery in

2009. A series of exhibits entitled “What if…” asked:

What if human tissue could be used to make objects? What if everyday products
contained synthetically produced living components? What if we could evaluate
the genetic potential of lovers? (p. 141)
The possibilities for the work’s impact would seem to be amplified here. Science

museums reach a much broader demographic than art museums. Visitors expect to

4
interact in their spaces. Art museums treat their exhibits gingerly. However, even if

people can touch things, they can’t talk to their designers.

So, as a reviewer convinced that Dunne and Raby deserve a wider audience, I have

created my own fiction—that the projects in Speculative Everything be presented as

theater. Instead of relying on wall labels or videos, live interpreters—interlocutors

between objects and people—would take up the task of interpretation so people could

come together to look and talk. Then speculative design might take a step further in

sparking political will and action. It would bring this work to life—where it really

belongs—by reconciling design fictions with non-fiction, the reality of live performance.