Objects of speculative design in the formation of publics

Design researchers from areas such as participatory design, interaction design, and service design have in recent years increasingly turned to the field of Science and Technology Studies as a source of analytical insights and methodological rigor. A great deal of inspiration has in particular been drawn from the work of Bruno Latour and his call for a shift from Realpolitik to Dingpolitik and a move from matters of fact to matters of concern, as the basis for new political ecologies (Latour 2004a, 2005). In this paper I will relate a specific encounter between STS and design research, by looking at the design research project Material Beliefs, and more specifically the use of what has recently been termed ‘speculative design’ (Kerridge, et al. 2010). While inspired by an STS approach to public engagement, the proponents of speculative design are interested in how, and to what extent, speculative design proposals can function as ‘co-constructors’ of new publics. Viewed from a design perspective, this project aims to bring conceptual and critical design proposals out of the galleries and design studios to engage in the formation of heterogeneous publics, and as such reads as a text book example of Latour’s proposed move from a focus on objects to a focus on ‘parliament of things’. The central argument of the paper is that an encounter between speculative design and the social sciences calls into question the political schema under which design objects are elevated to the status of things in the Latourian assembly of humans and non-humans. I argue that this discounts the possibility for objects to affect the formation of publics by other means. This claim hinges on the ontological assumption that objects are in ‘excess of their relations’ (Harman 2009) and that this ‘surplus’, in turn, enables objects to affect the formation of publics in ways that cannot be grasped by an actor-network approach. On this premise, the paper examines one of the design prototypes developed in the Material Beliefs project, and concludes by proposing three additional qualities in this object that affects the formation of publics, without partaking in the democratic construction of a parliament of things. &nbsp

Speculative Everything – Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming: Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby (The MIT Press, 2013)

Abstract Book review by Tau Ulv Lenskjold, postdoc at The University of Southern Denmar

(Re)narrating the holobiont through design

As part of design’s transformation towards sustainable practices, growing interest has been directed towards the inclusion of more-than- human perspectives. This workshop seeks to engage questions of giving voice to our microbiomes—the plethora of critters who co- constitute us as embodied and social beings but are most often invisible in both human experience and design practices. The aim is to experiment with collective and experiential ways of making tangibly present the microorganisms that live around on and within us and make us hosts of living assemblages, or what biologists refer to as holobionts. Beginning from past individual experiences, workshop participants are invited to collectively materialise, narrate, and perform more-than-human knowledge in the present. From these perspectives, we engage microbial-human interdependence, making it conceptually and methodically relatable by means of experimental design inquiry before re-narrating the collective experiences as microbial design futures.conference workshop</p

Speculative Prototypes and Alien Ethnographies: Experimenting with Relations Beyond the Human

This article concerns the role of speculative design prototypes as a means of intervening into everyday life contexts in order to explore, and possibly enable, new kinds of relations between humans and non-human beings. By addressing a human de-centring through design, the aim is to explore what kind of new possibilities might arise when design speculation meets a practice of doing what can be called an ‘alien ethnography’

A foray into not-quite companion species: design experiments with urban animals as significant others

Abstract This paper examines the project, Urban Animals and Us, as a journey - or foray - into the ‘terrain vague’ between people and (other) animals with whom we share urban space. Through three design experiments developed around speculative prototypes and co-design tools, we attempt to bring ’wild’ urban animals - like magpies and gulls into contact with the residents of a senior retirement home, to explore what new practices can arise between, otherwise, unconnected life-worlds. We expand the notion of companion species from philosopher of science Donna Haraway and begin to position the current project within a growing interest in animals in contemporary design research. Through analysis of the design experiments and the subsequent discussion, we argue, that a foray into interspecies relations, can inform the practical research agenda, and, help to re-articulate the dominant anthropocentricity of design research

Gambling in Greenlandic adolescents

Gambling has never been investigated in Greenlandic adolescents. High prevalence of gambling problems and a relation to other addictive behaviours has been found in adult Greenlanders. Greenlandic adolescents are daily exposed to gambling, for example, by selling lottery tickets, through advertises and electronic devices. The aim of this study is to investigate how Greenlandic adolescents perceive gambling, and to pilot test the Lie/Bet screening-instrument.Ten semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted for 31 adolescents, aged 12–16, from 3 schools in Nuuk, Greenland.The 31 adolescents have experiences with gambling. Whether they define a game as gambling depends on: 1) Whether the game is about playing with or about money, 2) whether the game is about earning items, 3) the gain/loss, 4) who they lose money to, and 5) the purpose. If the purpose is to have fun, it is not necessarily seen as gambling. None mentioned bingo as gambling, arguing that bingo is about having fun. Two recent trends were found to have reached Greenland: The close link between sports and gambling, and skin-betting. Additionally, the Lie/Bet screen was, with slight modifications, found to be useful as a screening-instrument among Greenlandic adolescents and it is proposed to be used in future studies