Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

Dunne and Raby's landmark for speculative and critical design — using design to imagine and debate possible futures rather than just serve the market. A deliberate step to the SDF's Frontier, and a challenge to the usual terms of the Economics motto. In the book, Dunne and Raby propose design as a way to open debate about the kind of future people want, and do not want, by posing deliberate what-if questions. Drawing on their own design and teaching practice alongside fine art, architecture, cinema, futurology, political theory and literary fiction, they walk through a series of provocations, including a solar kitchen restaurant, a flypaper robotic clock, and food-foraging devices built on synthetic biology. Their central claim is that speculating more, about more things, makes the future more malleable and improves the odds of arriving at a future worth having.