Speculative Design Ch. 1 - Response

The first part of this reading kind of flew over my head, because although I understood the difference between probable, plausible, possible, and preferable futures theoretically, it was hard for me to conceptualize without a real-life example of how exactly this type of thinking is put to use.

One idea that stuck out to me was the idea of a "preferable future," particularly when the author mentions "...what does preferable mean, for whom, and who decides? Currently, it is determined by government and industry." Also later on, when the history of "radical design" was discussed, it was said that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War, "market-led capitalism had won" and that there "were no longer other social or political possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with. Anything that did not fit was dismissed as fantasy, as unreal. At that moment, the 'real' expanded and swallowed up whole continents of social imagination marginalizing as fantasy whatever was left.”

This whole phenomenon of a single "perspective" persisting, while other ideas are marginalized reminded me of a conversation from one of my other classes about the "colonization" of design and design thinking. One student shared a Medium article that talked about how the existence of an "International Style" (where a select number of typefaces are seen as the "essential tool kit for typography") excludes "billions of people," particularly those who don't use Latin characters. Essentially, the author was drawing a connection between the proliferation of Modernism and Design Thinking to "Western imperialism and the violent destruction of indigenous cultures." The idea of colonization and seeing history through one lens (or in terms of design, one style that fits all) kind of connects to the ideas of Ch. 1 of design being limited by capitalism. Dismissing anything "that did not fit" as fantasy is essentially declaring one idea or style as supreme over others—a practice that is not dissimilar from what happens in colonization and imperialism. As the author of the Medium article put it, "by packaging Design Thinking as a promise to “good” design, all other nonconforming methods are flattened, dismissed, erased," which is a sentiment that is eerily similar to the one expressed in Ch. 1 of Speculative Design.

At the end of Ch. 1, the author claims that in order to turn our hopes back into dreams, "we need more pluralism in design, not of style but of ideology and values." Although the chapter was mainly focused on politics (they wrote that the "preferable" future is currently determined by "government and industry"), there are also cultural and racial factors that play into who has most power within government and industry. Thus, I agree with what they said about needing more pluralism of ideology and values within design; this includes not only political values, but cultural and ethnic values as well.