Do Designers Dream of Electric Sheep?
What would the world be like if we failed to control climate change, sea levels rose, and some humans lived underwater from then on? Perhaps humans would diverge into two kinds of creatures, one living on land and breathing with lungs, and one living underwater and evolving fins to breathe…
— One of my imagination about the future world
In the Design Future Unit of MA Service Design at the University of the Arts London, School of Communication London, we working with Southwark Council to explore the future of the borough, a future free from carbon emissions, to find out more opportunities for energy & buildings, transport, biodiversity and consumption.
Southwark is located on London’s South Bank. The council has declared a state of climate emergency and has decided to be carbon neutral by 2030. But councils can only control 14% of carbon emissions (Climate emergency. ), which means that popular support and behavioural change will be needed to reach the target.
To get to such a future, we have adopted design research and introduced public participation, RtD, speculative critical design and service design methods. It is a future-oriented reflection that wants to explore the future world from a citizen’s perspective, empowering citizens and creating a platform where more people can participate in discussions about a consensual future.
Beyond Design
The current design is a tool to realize commercial interests, becoming a production process in industrial production as a tool to enhance usability, experience and aesthetics (Papanek, 1985). Can design have a broader application than being an accomplice to the commodity economy? In fact, this is only one aspect of design, and the role of design as a reflective tool is gradually being forgotten (Dunne and Raby, 2014). How can design return or be liberated to a broader field? Design is supposed to share more social responsibility, reflecting on social culture, ethics and science and technology. This is what the Design Future course wants us to think about: design as a form of criticism, how to critique the future, and then return from the future to the present, to think about how we can subvert the present.
Don’t solve problems, ask questions!
How do you think about the future? This is an unfamiliar term to me, but it seems more familiar than design fiction or science fiction, which describes the good life brought by technological advances through stories of fictional scenarios, but the discursive design is different in that it hopes to amplify the limitations and negative effects of new technologies to generate a broad discussion.
Speculative Design is different in that it hopes to provoke a wider discussion by magnifying the limitations and negative effects of new technologies, where we use critical thinking to look at the future and ask questions through ‘what if’ (Dunne and Raby, 2014).
How to understand the future of design
To understand what it means to design the future, first, we need to understand two questions, what future is the future we are talking about here? and what future is the right future?
Everyone has a future they want, in Speculative Everything author Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby mentions that current design education is teaching people to go to a “Probable future” (Dunne and Raby, 2014), like a world on a set trajectory, where if nothing big happens, the world will be like that. (in fact, we who are experiencing Covid-19, are deviating from the previously imagined Probable future to a plausible future).
Thinking about plausible future scenarios can help guard against fragility. governments and businesses need foresight capabilities in order to address systemic challenges.(Bland and Westlake, 2013)
What we need to imagine in this course is the preferable future, which, as shown above, lies between the Probable and the plausible future, a difficult position to be acknowledged, one that cleverly avoids the “most probable” but does not completely depart from it, a future that we hope for.
With all this talk, how do you find the future of energy and buildings in Southwark? First, we did horizon scanning (Horizon Scanning Programme: a new approach for policy making. ), (horizon scanning is a tool to identify the potential threats and opportunities in the future).
Firstly, we researched what the current energy situation is like, for the UK: energy has started to move towards sustainability, high pollution and high carbon emission fossil fuels are gradually withdrawn from production (Electricity generation mix by quarter and fuel source (GB). 2016), but due to the division of labour in the global industry chain, products consumed in the UK come from other countries, which is actually just a transfer of carbon emissions, leaving carbon emissions “normal” life completely unworkable.
Regarding the production of energy, solar and wind energy are already approaching the cost of traditional energy sources (Global renewable energy trends. ). In the case of solar energy, for example, it takes energy to produce solar panels, but there is now a gradual move toward a positive cycle of producing more solar panels to producing more solar energy to producing more solar panels, which gets rid of the embarrassing situation of producing sustainable energy that also requires fossil energy. Solar energy is now starting to have a chance to compete with fossil energy in terms of cost, even without government subsidies.
We did some interviews with residents. There is not much awareness of energy, centralised energy production does not have much connection with people’s lives, people are only in contact with the power plugs in their houses, the electricity bills, the public debate is focused on the safety of nuclear energy, the price of electricity, the price of energy conversions etc. The renovation of buildings, especially existing ones, requires wide participation of the inhabitants and a high level of awareness of sustainable energy.
Based on this background information and the basic facts about Southwark Energy (Climate Crisis and Southwark. ), we have some initial ideas…
Decentralised energy supply
In the future people will become more and more atomised and new technologies will make geo-factors less important, people will live more “freely” than ever before, this is reflected in the choice of where they live and it is likely that many will turn out to live more and more out of the gird. Energy supply patterns may follow this trend to some extent, so is community-based energy production going to be the norm?
People’s concerns about energy have changed dramatically
How will people respond to the fact that the future is expected to have a different energy awareness than the present, one that may reach into all aspects of life and become the “norm” of everyday life? There are already many people who say they are unable to adapt to the digital technology of today. For example, in China, everything is being digitised, which leaves many elderly and special groups at a loss, so will there be such “people left behind by technological life” in the new society of the future
How will architecture change
The mechanism of sustainable energy production leads to some fundamental changes, for example, solar energy only operates when there is light, and wind energy only produces energy during the windy season, which inevitably creates a lot of devices for storing energy, will buildings also change according to such rules? For example, in order to store solar energy, the building itself might be a large potential battery that rises when energy is produced and falls when it is used to release the stored energy.
With the initial ideas in mind, we began to validate them and we spoke to professionals at New Energy to make sure it wasn’t extrapolated from thin air. To be honest, it was a confusing moment for me and my mind kept assessing whether this future was too futuristic, or not futuristic enough.
To help me with my thinking, let’s put some basic limits on this future. In conjunction with Southwark’s target, we set it at around 2030, more than a decade from now, which helped us to remove some of the more radical ideas, such as the idea of energy storage for community buildings, although it has been proven viable by some energy professionals. But we still keep this concept of energy with limits, which we hope is a sign of increased (or passive) citizen energy awareness.
Next, we want to follow the principles of Research through Design. By building a prototype, testing the design in design practice, and in the process of testing, gaining new knowledge and continuing to use it in design practice (The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. ).
Don’t say it, show it!
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” (Frederik Pohl)
I understand that we are not trying to show a utopian future, because even in the future, a happy future for all may never come, determined by the limits of humanity itself. But I felt slightly compassionate towards this future we envisaged, and I remember saying to my group that the future we were trying to show was too painful, (decentralised energy production and a fairly high energy sustainability-conscious community), to even be as happy as life is now — we are now ignorantly and happily polluting the environment.
At the same time, the designer’s “everyday rationality” prevented me from ignoring the comical and unrealistic parts of this future, an impracticality that we have tried to avoid in previous projects, “like who wants to live in a community that feels energy-constrained?” But that’s one of the things I think the course has inspired me most — who says the design has to “work”? (I’ll expand on this below)
For example, James Chamber designed a Disk Driver (Chambers, J.) that detects when the water is “standing up” on its own. I quickly drew a cable that would find its own charging port.
This more or less absurd design is not entirely unworkable. In fact, similar functions are already available in today’s floor sweepers, which return to the charging station to recharge themselves after sweeping the floor and call for help like a human when they get themselves stuck.
Back to the project, after the speculative, how do you get people to understand your ideas? This is the strength of being a designer and why Discursive Design exists as a concept design.
Designers live forever in the future, but have a magical ability to bring the future into the present — to materialise and visualise what exists in the imagination, something designers are born with. The design itself is also a practical activity, exploring design conceptually, deriving a theory through deduction, and then making a tool through theory. To give an example for my own understanding, I have been working in UX design before and the ideas that designers come up with are often more practical and concrete, a characteristic that comes from visualising concepts over time.
But often things just get overdone. For example, I would like to use a simple test tool to start people’s awareness of energy and at the same time retrofit buildings for energy sustainability. This is obviously of some relevance, but it’s hard to generate some discussion, people don’t use this practical gadget as a thought-starter and the best comment might be “where can I buy it?
We tried to present a scenario using the production of a future newspaper.
Combine the scenario and all the ideas and we have a complete picture of the future:
Energy Independent Living Estate
In the year 2030, the Paris Agreement becomes a mandatory law and people are gradually accepting restrictions on energy use. In the Southwark Council owned community, buildings are being retrofitted with wind and solar energy to produce green and cheap energy for the residents to use compared to the national grid, while the occupants have to adapt to a life with energy restrictions.
We then took the idea step by step and made more detailed prototypes of the many scenarios we imagined, from all the scenarios of a person’s life, and in testing with people we continued to develop these prototypes, making them more intuitive and removing scenarios that were not quickly understood or were overly articulate. The final product — “Southwark’s first self-sustaining community” — looks at this future world from the perspective of its inhabitants.
You can see the solar panels and wind paddles on the roof.
The message board in the lobby of the flat reflects some of the details of life, the rules of energy, the energy monitors and even the neighbours who steal energy from others. It gives a better understanding of the conflicts in this future world, and you can see side-by-side that some people have adapted well to living with energy restrictions, while others are trying to fit into such a world, and some are trying to resist it all.
It’s as if in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the protagonist buys an electronic sheep (a thing to brag about in the world of fiction) in order to show off, even though they live on a post-nuclear-destruction Earth.
The roommate was severely reprimanded for uncontrolled use of energy. A living room for someone newly moved into an energy self-sufficient community.
Be more critical
I have talked a lot above about some of the impacts and reflections that this project has brought about, but I’ll go on to end the article with a few additions, some of which may be stretch ideas, some of which are perfect for packing them away, and some of which are things I want to continue to explore:
Useful and useless
I tried to look at Speculative Design in the same critical way.
First of all, I rethought what design is. Although it is not easy to admit it, design has a tendency to look at everything, a tendency that allows designers to indulge in — “I design your life” — in an overbearing and false sense of euphoria.
For example, the ubiquitous “Design without thinking”, “Design that exploits human weaknesses” and “Feeding people what they want to see” in UX design reek of stupidity, which I have to say is not unlike the stench and smell of commercial design.
Speculative Design is against all this, against practical design, but then it says let designers work with experts and social elites and then open it up to the public for discussion (Dunne and Raby, 2014), but how do you balance the advice of experts and the public?
- Professionals are often called professionals because they have more knowledge and easier access to information, which creates a barrier to professionalism, and this also means that they often have different opinions from the general population
- At the same time, there is a growing trend towards the atomisation of social thought, and even among residents, there is now a very wide divergence of opinion, with different interest groups having different demands.
Just as you can’t argue with anyone on Twitter, what does a discussion without rules bring? Or perhaps the fact that we aim to generate more arguments is enough to combat the persistent problem of “design exhaustion”.
But this critique also makes me feel the hypocrisy of my own ego, of criticising commercial design and yet indulging in it. I think this is the disturbing truth of the real world: we talk about independent thinking, but speak with the usual ideas copied from elsewhere to gain the approval of the majority in social spaces (Paul Graham, 2004); everyone writes “I like to work with open-minded people, but I’m afraid to say my own bizarre dreams and cast strange glances when others say things that don’t fit the popular view.
Design can also be humorous and ironic
Design for consumerism, always optimistic, always giving positive feedback to the user, functional, cheap, good enough, new technology for the benefit of all. The end result is that everyone wears the same clothes, does the same things, uses the same devices, designers need to be frantic to find solutions and the more realistic the better, design is part of a consumer product and needs to be functional and useful, the design seems to have the right answer — it has to sell well enough as a commodity. And while humour or irony is not recognised, in Speculative Design it is a necessity. Conflict and silliness take people away from the formal stereotypical discussion and provoke a shift in perception and understanding, thus creating more possibilities. Thinking outside the box, whether it is Speculative Design, Critical Design or Antidesign, tells us that “making people think” is also design (Dunne and Raby, 2001).
Simplicity is Aesthetic
I don’t know when designers became obsessed with calculating logic and finding rationality in design, as if they were dodging obstacles, teetering on the razor’s edge, dancing with shackles on their feet. Perhaps the matter could be much simpler: find the future — change the present — 💥 finish.
It’s like the design of Elon Musk’s Starlink project.
- Why are satellite communications so slow now?
Because satellites are so far from the ground.
- Why are satellites so far from the ground?
Because the FCC and some international rules limit the height of satellites (‘Coalition Led By SpaceX, Blue Origin Want to Rewrite FCC Rules On Space Use’, 2020). Then change the international rules now and launch near-Earth orbit and super-Earth orbit for communication. The conceptual design allows the design to escape the “realistic gravitational pull of the earth” and perhaps things are far less complicated than we think.
This likewise leads to the next thing I want to say.
Dream on! And then tell a convincingly bizarre story
Maybe you think I’m crazy, how can certainty and bizarreness coexist? To continue with Elon Musk’s story, his space program, his human migration program, each one of them is bizarre and scary, but his logic is “surely humans have to migrate to space, but we don’t even have a moon base now, is that normal?”. . Perhaps this is a dream, or perhaps it is a storytelling approach to describing the future — how to explore the many futures and technologies to weave a dream that is bold enough to be imaginative, yet has a solid ground — a preferable future.
Finally, a little package for myself
1. think of one more new thing, try to think outside the usual way
2. Ask questions! Get people to communicate
3. thinking something big, think more from a social perspective
4. be bold, but at the same time be grounded
Reference
‘Coalition Led By SpaceX, Blue Origin Want to Rewrite FCC Rules On Space Use’, (2020) Observer, -11–04T21:42:34+00:00. Available at: https://observer.com/2020/11/spacex-blue-origin-virgin-coalition-urge-fcc-to-rewrite-spectrum-rules/ (Accessed: May 18, 2021).
Electricity generation mix by quarter and fuel source (GB). (2016) Available at: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data-portal/electricity-generation-mix-quarter-and-fuel-source-gb (Accessed: May 18, 2021).
Climate Crisis and Southwark. Available at: https://southwarkclimateideas.commonplace.is/overview (Accessed: May 18, 2021).
Climate emergency. Available at: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/environment/climate-emergency?chapter=2&article (Accessed: May 18, 2021).
Chambers, J. The Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive. Available at: https://www.rca.ac.uk/students/james-chambers/(Accessed: May 18, 2021).
The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed (Accessed: May 18, 2021).
Global renewable energy trends. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/power-and-utilities/global-renewable-energy-trends.html (Accessed: May 18, 2021).
Horizon Scanning Programme: a new approach for policy making. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/horizon-scanning-programme-a-new-approach-for-policy-making (Accessed: May 18, 2021).
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Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2014) Speculative Everything. MIT Press.
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Paul Graham (2004) Hackers & Painters. 9780596006624th edn. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Vance, A. (2015) Elon Musk. Ecco.
van Dorsser, C., Walker, W.E., Taneja, P. and Marchau, Vincent A. W. J. (2018) ‘Improving the link between the futures field and policymaking’, Futures, 104, pp. 75–84. DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2018.05.004.
