Making a Case for Hope
Posted on November 14, 2019So much of what we see, consume, and create right now is bleak. And arguably, it’s not hard to see why. We are facing an unprecedented climate crisis, the cusp of a mass extinction event, black boxed algorithms even their creators don’t understand, continued growing wealth inequity, and increasing understanding of the complexity of wicked problems that makes any attempt at a solution seem futile. It’s bad. However. If we choose to give up, and resign ourselves to nihilism and apathy, it most certainly won’t get any better.
What we need is more deliberate hope in our design, especially speculative critical design. In fact, I would argue that there’s nothing speculative about dystopian design. It is simply another expression of dominant design frameworks and symbolic violence. [Rosner 2018, Boehnert & Onafuwa 2016] But what if we deliberately worked outside of those frameworks? What if, instead, we actually completely disrupted them and decolonized our methodologies of speculative critical design? What if decolonized speculative design was the ultimate exercise in hope?
But, how? If we consider the theory that our reality is determined by the hybrid network relationships between everything [Latour 1991, 2005] and that our reality and representations are a relational process [Çalişkan & Callon 2009], then logically it follows that the things we as designers create will become part of those hybrid relational networks that define our reality. Much like a quantum event that results in a multiverse – although strictly metaphorical – reality is defined by the observer who defines the boundaries of their observation. When we choose to draw boundaries and create something, we are blinding ourselves to a reality in which the opposite thing exists. Which means that when we choose to design something that is an expression of colonized frameworks, we are shutting ourselves off from the alternate reality that is an anti- or de-colonized. And if our representations, the things we create, form part of the network for our reality, then when we choose to create things that perpetuate a dystopian neoliberal capitalist colonized society, we are paving the way to make that a continuation of our present. As we move away from product & market focused design and into the larger influence design now has on our society, we have a greater responsibility for what we choose to make. “Design is also a vehicle for the deepest human aspirations and for hope, and as such it should be a matter of widespread concern.” [Escobar, 2008]
Ahmed Ansari writes that, “any engagement with articulating a relation between decoloniality and design necessitates articulating the relation in terms both poietic and praxical. For me, this means engaging with the nature of what design practice helps bring into being.” [Ansari et. all, 2018] We experience and live in the ripple effects of the relationships between our representations and reality. I consider speculative critical design less of a way of imagining the future, and more of a way of critically considering our past and present and imagining alternate realities from the one we live in right now. So if we assume that this is all true, then I believe that a decolonized hope-full speculative critical design might be a way to make those alternate realities our own. Maybe when we create honest, hopeful speculative design and we push ourselves out of our comfortable frameworks to imagine alternate realities, we’re touching other worlds in the multiverse and allowing those realities to become the one we live in, here and now.
Let’s be clear. Afrofuturists are already doing this: “future-looking Black scholars, artists, and activists are not only reclaim-ing their right to tell their own stories, but also to critique the European/ American digerati class of their narratives about cultural others, past, present and future”. [Anderson] Many working in the decolonizing spheres are already doing this, and have been for a long time; “New methods…conceive of design as eminently user-centered, participatory, collaborative, and radically contextual; seek to make the processes and structures that surround us intelligible and knowable so as to induce ecological and systems literacy among users; and so forth.” [Escobar, 2008] Mine are not new ideas. But I do believe that as speculative critical design – or perhaps just the growing horizon of what design can do – expands, we must prioritize non-Eurocentric voices to lead the charge. We need misrepresented and historically marginalized peoples to lead us towards new forms of speculative design that imagine away from our dominant paradigms and create new methods. And that future, I believe, is a hopeful one.
A. Lathrop
Sources:
Rosner, Daniela. 2018. Critical Fabulations. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Boehnert, Dr. Joanna, and Dimeji Onafuwa. 2016. “Design As Symbolic Violence: Reproducing The ‘Isms’ + A Framework For Allies”. Intersectional Perspectives On Design, Politics And Power.
Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Çalışkan, Koray, and Michel Callon. 2009. “Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention From The Economy Towards Processes Of Economization”. Economy And Society 38 (3): 369-398. doi:10.1080/03085140903020580.
Anderson, Reynoldo. AFROFUTURISM 2.0 & THE BLACK SPECULATIVE ART MOVEMENT
Escobar, Autruo. Notes on the Ontology of Design