Companies have successfully implemented speculative design

The argument

Although speculative design is a fairly new concept, similar approaches have been taken before. Prominent technology in contemporary society wouldn’t be if innovative steps that questioned every possibility didn’t take place. Speculative design implemented on a wider scale could result in greater growth. Speculative design is akin to the science fiction genre, pushing futuristic architecture to “explore challenges and opportunities of an aging society”. This fiction has been proven influential on technological advancements. NASA has gone on record about their inspiration from the technology featured on Star Trek, and most notably the iPhone was a result of speculative thought, with engineers developing a user interface around problems they had yet to face. Bracing for future possibilities, as opposed to focusing on the current market, can give organizations a head start in their respective fields. Competition has already started. Google encourages employees to spend twenty percent of their time on side projects, a strategy responsible for apps such as Google Maps and G-Mail. With partnerships are forming between major companies and those based on speculative design, breaking the “constraints of short-term revenue cycles to speculate on alternative future” is becoming mandatory to thrive in the technological world. As Anthony Dunne states, “we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening”.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that none of the examples is speculative design, so the premise that companies have implemented it successfully is not established. The iPhone was a product-development programme with market research and a commercial target, which is the ordinary practice of design rather than the speculative kind; Google's twenty-percent policy is intrapreneurship, allocating time to build shippable products; and NASA citing Star Trek is an anecdote about inspiration drawn from entertainment, not a corporate design method. Speculative and critical design, as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby defined it — and the argument quotes Dunne — was framed explicitly as a counterpoint to design in the service of the market, using proposals that are not meant to be built in order to open debate about the futures technology is producing. Enlisting it as a route to commercial growth inverts the position of the source the argument relies on. Critics add that the reasoning is selective: technologies that succeeded are traced back to visionary thinking while the speculative projects that led nowhere are not counted, and that even if foresight pays, that is a case for scenario planning and strategic foresight — established corporate disciplines — rather than for speculative design specifically.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The examples are not speculative design: the iPhone was a commercial product-development programme with a market target, and NASA citing Star Trek is an anecdote about inspiration drawn from entertainment rather than a design method practised in a firm. [Rejecting P2] Google's twenty-percent policy is intrapreneurship — time allocated to build shippable products — not the making of non-commercial proposals to provoke debate; and Dunne and Raby, whom the argument quotes, framed critical and speculative design explicitly as a counterpoint to design in the service of the market. [Rejecting C] The reasoning counts only the technologies that succeeded, leaving out speculative projects that led nowhere — and to the extent foresight pays, that argues for scenario planning and strategic foresight, established corporate disciplines, rather than for speculative design.