As part of the Walker's presentation of Designs for Different Futures (on view now—or at least when the museum reopens), we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019) exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing.
— C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 19551
The field of design is about projecting forward, imagining new possibilities that can transform the present and help create new potential futures. From our buildings, streets, education, food, and health care to our political, economic, and communications systems, the range of projects that designers are engaged with has grown exponentially, especially in recent years, as centuries of experience are being rethought in response to digitalization. The critic and futurist Alvin Toffler forecast in 1970 that what the world needed was “a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies—images of potential tomorrows.”2 His ideas seem as relevant today as they did then. In our own time of rapid change and social and political struggle, it feels increasingly urgent to look at where we have come from, where we are now, and where we are going. The projects included in this publication, grounded in contemporary issues, promote forms of inquiry and prioritize questions that grapple with the role of design in society today. Whether designs for lab-grown meats, robotic companions, or smart cities, they confirm Toffler’s belief that “conjecture, speculation and the visionary view [are] as coldly practical a necessity as feet-on-the-floor ‘realism.’”3 In their range of ideas they retain a connection to the past, yet make the case for the importance of freeing the design imagination to challenge the status quo and offer new potential realities and alternative worldviews that can help us, for example, readdress the balance of power and offer more equitable ways forward.
Throughout history, and especially during the twentieth century, the field of design was inextricably bound to issues of functionality and charged with solving real-life (rather than theoretical) problems. Today, however, many see design as itself the problem, especially in its direct relationship to global economies and ecologies. In effect, the field is being challenged to consider its own limitations and potentially outdated working processes, and to think and design itself out of its box—to unbox itself (to borrow a contemporary idiom). In 1971 the designer and educator Victor Papanek cautioned in Design for the Real World, “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few.”4
With chapters on such issues as design’s ethical and environmental responsibility, his book was a call to arms. As Papanek asserted then, “the design of any product unrelated to its sociological, psychological, or ecological surroundings is no longer possible or acceptable.”5 Today, design is again being charged with rethinking given conditions in order to become more responsible, more inclusive, and more ethical.
While Papanek sought to reconsider the existing landscape of everyday objects to address real-world concerns related to social and cultural life, other of his contemporaries proposed visionary schemes that questioned the very context of design and what it could or should be. Well-known examples from the twentieth century include the experiments of inventive thinkers such as R. Buckminster Fuller, whose Dome over Manhattan (1960) was a theoretical design for a three-kilometer geodesic dome spanning Midtown Manhattan that would regulate weather and reduce air pollution. This project anticipated our current environmental challenges, especially in dense urban areas. Another equally potent example is Walking City, by the London-based Archigram.
Represented in the drawings of Ron Herron, this hypothetical project from the 1960s depicts a city as a giant insect-like structure that moves across the globe on enormous legs, providing resources to different places and endlessly adapting to change. The concept prefigured contemporary transient lifestyles, fueled by new technologies, such as smartphones, that are changing how we live, work, and communicate, while simultaneously challenging long-held concepts of belonging and displacement. Walking City, like Fuller’s Dome over Manhattan, emphasized farsighted approaches to architecture and design that it was then not possible to implement, but that could perhaps one day be realized by embracing new technologies as modes of survival. As a counterproposition, contemporaneous groups such as Superstudio in Italy recommended “life without objects,”6 demonstrating a more ambivalent relationship to technology and questioning the need for yet more objects of design. Superstudio instead proposed a future existence devoid of commercially produced products. Read today, as we are faced with mounting environmental and economic crises and the implications of automation and overconsumption, among other challenges, their proposition no longer seems so far-fetched as it once might have. Although the political punch of these utopian projects may have faded—their critique of society has since been questioned for its lack of accountability and consideration of deeper social and political issues, in addition to its Western bias—their visual force and the potential for architecture and design to be powerful agents of change have endured. The continuing relevance of these projects lies in their ability to stimulate the imagination and foster new readings of the world as a way to shift perspectives and promote change.
In our own time of political disorientation, when the efficacy and agency of the “modern era” is once again being reconsidered and the disparity between the human-made and the natural world continues to grow, it is necessary to once again rethink design’s methods and critical engagement across geographic, social, and political territories in order to engender alternative worldviews and propose more equitable and inclusive ways forward.7 With the development of new technologies and the increasingly wide distribution of information, the potential for sharing and circulating ideas has grown tremendously, but how this will ultimately impact the practice of design is still being determined. Rather than perpetuating the myth of the lone hero working in isolation to invent solutions, new technologies encourage collaborative practices in which ideas shared over computer networks have the potential to overturn convention. Yet as Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and pioneer in the field of virtual reality, attests, “It is the politics and economics of these networks that will determine how new capabilities translate into new benefits for ordinary people.”8 His words resonate with those of the novelist William Gibson, who had earlier asserted, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.”9 That is, societal change, including that enabled by design, is dependent on the politics and economics of the global market. Nonetheless, with the growth of social-media outlets there has been a shift in responsibility. Global challenges have entered the public consciousness, and now everyone is accountable.10 “The ‘state of the world’ and the state of design need to be brought together,” charges the theorist Tony Fry, calling us to radically rethink the role of design in the world.11
So what is design’s efficacy and role in the world today? Susan Yelavich, a professor and curator of design, warns that “design has become a panacea for whatever ails. Politically neutral, never demanding, the popular perception of design threatens to override criticality and obscure its capacity to engender agency, in the best sense of that word.”12
The challenge for design is to recognize market forces and political constraints while maintaining enough distance to foster the imagination and allow critical positions that can reorganize and rethink economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups using the languages, forms, and methods of design. The sociologist and political activist Peter Frase calls us to reclaim the “tradition of mixing imaginative speculation with political economy” and contends that “sketching out multiple futures is an attempt to leave a place for the political and the contingent.”13 These ideas seem increasingly prescient in our present “post-truth” moment, when the rise of “alternative facts” has made it imperative that we analyze more closely to understand the context in which ideas and information (and misinformation) arise and are made available.14 As it becomes increasingly difficult to retain faith in the concept of progress as an inevitable and ongoing positive force that takes into account our collective concerns, it also seems more important to counter the “suppression of the design imagination” in thinking about the future.15 As the philosopher Stephen T. Asma has described, our cognitive experiences are made up of simultaneous “‘almosts’ or ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’” that enable us to imagine different realities all at once, a capability essential for human development.16 How, then, might design continue to question everyday life from multiple perspectives, different generations, and various places so as to reconfigure the present for the future?
The following case studies are not meant to be exhaustive but are a sampling of the ways in which designers, architects, and others are grappling with how to foster the imagination to collectively and meaningfully transform society.
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"WHAT IF DESIGN EDUCATION’S FOCUS ON ‘MAKING STUFF ’ PERPETUATES ... A DYSFUNCTIONAL PRESENT?”17
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, professors of design and social inquiry and codirectors of the Designed Realities Studio at the New School in New York, have spent the better part of two decades exploring how “design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”18 Their work on critical design, a term Dunne coined in 1999 and which he and Raby consider to describe “a position more than a method,” aims to deepen and extend an awareness and understanding of design, especially as it relates to our interactions with objects and their role in contemporary society. 19
Interested in how design can be a trigger to spark healthy dialogue, intellectual exchange, and dissent, they employ “design fiction”—a form of scenario building and storytelling—to explore the emotional as well as intellectual capacities of design. These ideas have been comprehensively explored in publications such as Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (2001), in which they investigate the way mobile phones, computers, and other electronic objects influence our experience of the environment, and they became the foundation of the Design Interactions program. Initiated by Dunne at London’s Royal College of Art in 2006, this interdisciplinary research group has since been credited with launching a generation of critical designers.20 The critical-design approach has not escaped criticism, however, having been much discussed and debated.21 Dissenters find the field too tied to speculative practices and academic inquiries that they argue don’t take enough responsibility for their social and political positions and ability to be inclusive.22 And yet, it is clear that these types of disciplinary methods and approaches are raising essential questions about design’s relationship to the “real world,” the definition of which is now a recurrent debate far more complex than even Papanek could have foreseen.
Dunne, who continues to tackle the contradictions and challenges facing design and especially design education, has more recently asked:
What if our approach to design is wrong? What if educating designers to work with prevailing economic, social, technological and political realities—designing for how the world is now, has become a convenient conceit? What if teaching student designers to frame every issue, no matter how complex, as a problem to be solved squanders valuable creative and imaginative energy on the unachievable. What if design education’s focus on “making stuff real” perpetuates everything that is wrong with current reality, ensuring that all possible futures are merely extrapolations of a dysfunctional present?23
Dunne and Raby are currently reconsidering their own working processes and long-held belief in an object-oriented approach to design, as well as design’s role in everyday life, as a way to further challenge ideas associated with consumerism and new technologies. At the Designed Realities Studio they are engaging with a much wider range of disciplines and practices—including political science, anthropology, sociology, history, economics, and philosophy—in an effort to understand design’s place within this complex network and to learn how to situate their work within larger historical trajectories related to imagination and speculation, with the potential to suggest “new world views made tangible through an expanded form of design practice.”24The result is an anthropological approach to design that considers how we might design behaviors as well as objects to incite a new consciousness within the field of design and in the world around us.
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“THE TENSION BETWEEN THE ACTIVE AND PASSIVE QUEERING OF DAILY LIFE”
The artist Mary Maggic, whose approach involves collaboration across the fields of design, science, and biology, creates projects that help us reconsider our understanding of the world by interrogating gender codes and breaking taboos. Through projects such as Estrofem! Lab and Housewives Making Drugs (included in the exhibition Designs for Different Futures), Maggic calls attention to “the tension between the active and passive queering of daily life”—for example, the ways in which our bodies are altering because of changes to the environment or through interventions such as hormone therapy, among other concerns rarely discussed openly in society.25
As Maggic explains:
While you can be a uterus-owning woman seeking birth control pills, or a trans-femme seeking hormone replacement therapy, this is an active form of altering one’s body to reproduce a gendered program. Meanwhile, every single one of us, including of course non-human species, are undergoing a disruption to our bodies, health, and (hetero)normative delineations through all of the industrial toxicities xeno-hormones that pervade our planet. This molecular colonization is tied deeply to patriarchy and capitalism and is incred-ibly invisible. So art and design, especially interdisciplinary practices, are able to reframe all of these complexities and provide room for contemplation and even action.
Maggic’s work urges us to imagine new ways of identifying as individuals and communities by questioning norms and standards and probing our objective and subjective outlooks. For the past three years, Maggic has been hacking hormones, both natural and synthetic, to answer questions about biopolitical agency and emancipation. Through the lens of a fictional television show, inspired by the type of program popularized by Martha Stewart—the epitome of an entrenched idea of what it means to be feminine and domestic—they have created a recognizable platform for discussing these ideas: “A satire on a kitchen television show became the obvious vehicle and chosen battleground to discuss issues around trans experiences and access to hormones, the ethics and risks of self-administering and how we can undermine the patriarchy.” Through theoretical and speculative projects like Housewives Making Drugs that question real and projected conditions (with large doses of humor and irony but serious intentions), Maggic seeks to elevate conversations related to the body, all the while making their research and development processes open and transparent through workshops and online platforms (Estrofem! Lab) that make clear their intentions and the context for their work: “I think we need to hack at all levels, the societal, the cultural, the political, in order to ask the necessary critical questions and begin mapping out new worlds and ways of thinking,” they assert. “What started from ‘how can we make hormones in the kitchen’ led to ‘how are hormones currently produced and distributed’ to ‘who controls the access’ to ‘how do they produce our gendered subjectivities’ to ‘what is male and female anyway and how can we collectively dismantle and deprogram this binary system?’” With their all-inclusive attitude, Maggic reminds us of the importance of contesting preconceived ideas and the need to constantly look for “new tools, tactics, and reflections” that are accountable, diverse, and plural in outlook. Ultimately, Maggic reminds us that we are all responsible as “part of a social mutagenesis!”
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"HYPER-ACCELERATE THE FIELD OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY AND SHED LIGHT ON ERUPTIVE INCIDENTS AT POLITICAL NEXUSES, [AND] WITHIN SOCIAL CONDITIONS”
As Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture, based in London, sees it:
The so-called real world is so full of mystery, incoherence, and unknowns that to comprehend what has happened requires nothing less than imagining something new; abandoning the real would result in the impoverishment of the imagination.26
In a time radically different from the rapid industrialization and change of the decades after World War II, Weizman calls for rearranging or reimagining what can be known rather than breaking away from the past—as was proposed by many architecture and design visionaries in the twentieth century. He recognizes that today it is the media, communications, data, and speed that are determining change in society, more than the building of architectural structures. But the vocabulary of architecture and design has not transformed at the same pace as in other fields: “The amount of data we can process, the scenarios that we can imagine, has exponentially increased; yet the parameters of a concert venue, a museum, a shopping mall have moved only incrementally.” Instead of making buildings, Weizman harnesses the less concrete tools and techniques of architecture and design—“ways of seeing, speculating, researching, interrogating, and determining risk ratios, using simulation, structural engineering, fluid dynamics, etc., to run scenarios on other fields of knowledge and operations and to clarify incidents erupting within the molecular durations of time.” Rather than position his work in the realm of construction and building, he locates it in the realm of investigation, interrogation, and simulation to “hyper-accelerate the field of architectural history and shed light on eruptive incidents at political nexuses, within social conditions, etc.” The goal is to make visible the hidden systems and processes impacting the world so as to inform current discourse and open up the potential for transformations that can help us reimagine our political, economic, social, and cultural life.
As this sampling of ideas suggests, “design imagination” is understood here as a method that “re-imagines what is in the image of what could or should be,” to quote the social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.27 In other words, the primary concern is to use the tools of cross-disciplinary practices, including design, to shift perspectives, open up new lines of investigation, stimulate dialogue and the exchange of ideas, and instigate new ways of seeing and being in the world that consider societal norms and standards, including within design and architecture, not as givens but as perennial areas of examination and exploration. While not meant to be conclusive or absolute, the case studies touched on here reinforce the conversations in this volume to underscore how architects, designers, and others are using design—specifically critical, speculative, and associative design practices—to both imagine and propose alternative ways of thinking about and interacting with the present to inform the future. These approaches employ the tools of scenario building and the tactics of subversion, as well as the analysis and modes of representation inherent to architecture and design, to open up ideas. In effect, they underscore what other creative minds have urged through their work, such as the socially engaged poet and novelist Percy Bysshe Shelley, who contended in his “Defence of Poetry” (1821) that “the great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”28 In our own time, the writer and imaginer of other worlds Ursula K. Le Guin asserted, “If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly.”29 Speculation, simulations, fictional television shows, role play, workshops, and the like are all tools that can help architects and designers grapple with complex issues and render their visions from different viewpoints and parts of the globe to test the efficacy of their ideas. The goal is to find the right degree of freedom and the best approaches to design to counter dominant narratives and suggest alternative and more inclusive worldviews, while understanding the contexts in which new ideas are imagined and circulated. We can’t predict the future, but as this publication suggests, it is fruitful to imagine what might be possible, hoping that many more things might happen than actually do. ▪︎
ZOË RYAN is the Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She was formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the editor of As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History (2017) and curator of In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury (2019) and the 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be. Her projects explore the impact of architecture and design on society.
The catalogue was produced by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with design by the Walker Art Center. It was edited and conceived by the exhibition’s curators: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, formerly the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Text and compilation © 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Art Institute of Chicago
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