Transmission 14.2: 'ADD TITLE'
This is a broadcast for designers and time travel facilitators. It has insights about the speculative practice, and tools we use in our method that they could try as well. Today we have 20-min worlds.
‘ADD TITLE’, a new case for applied speculative design research
doubt, introspection, hope, optimism, joy, doubt
This is the second transmission of Maria Jędryszek’s ‘ADD TITLE’ project. (Find the first transmission here).
Maria is The Time Travel Agency’s designer in residency for spring 2022 (and 2050).
The road traversed (the Yellow disc)
In order to continue the research, and find playful and interactive ways to travel through the content, we’ve divided the ‘ADD TITLE’ project in four discs: The Metaverse, The Thought Experiments, The Methodology, and The Results.
Throughout the next weeks, we will introduce and explore each disc in depth, and by overlapping one on another, see how they create a multidimensional view of the narratives.
Through this project we hope to strengthen the theory linking design fiction, speculative design, and thought experiments; find methods to ease communicating the terms of what discursive practice is; find its application in business; and create a tool to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Thought experiments and their relation to speculative design (the Blue disc)
HOW MIGHT WE USE THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS AS A DESIGN RESEARCH METHOD? - Maria Jędryszek
Imagine you place a cat in a sealed box with a small amount of radioactive substance. When the substance decays, it triggers a Geiger counter which releases a poison that…
This picture was neither a scientific theory, nor a scientific experiment, but a visual tool to illustrate the paradox of quantum superposition, created by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. A thought experiment.
Thought experiments aren't limited to only visualize complex problems in the world of physics or mathematics. You can find various scenarios triggering discussions in philosophy, ethics, logic, aesthetics, social structures, language and more. The application of such experiments in “the real world” varies: Martin Cohen explores the aim of thought experiments in “Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments” and points out two major intents:
To test out certain assumptions, through imagining a series of logically implied consequences
To employ intuition to discover new information and create new relationships (Cohen, 2005)
In “A Function of Thought Experiments”, Thomas Kuhn underlines the power of paradigm shifts and addresses how thought experiments can provide information on our understating and conceptualization.
Friedrich Schelling (the Father of post- metaphysical thinking) described Speculative Philosophy as “looking for a middle way between blind laboratory science and fruitless metaphysical speculations” (2005)
While falling down the rabbit hole with Alice, following Maxwell's Demon through chambers, trying out the Body Exchange Machine, and traveling in time with my imaginary twin, I realized that thought experiments, design fiction, and speculative design have much in common. - Maria Jędryszek
Speculative Design subtlety nudges people into discussing the extreme, it becomes a catalyst bringing fiction into reality, creating utopias and dystopias. Through starting a debate about even far fetched future scenarios, we start a discussion about the Now. These speculations seemingly distant from reality, come to life, become palpable, create awareness of potential risks, open the imagination of alternative ways of being and can make a huge impact in human behavior.
In “Speculative Design as Thought Experiments” we read how “understanding speculative design by analogy to thought experiments could help design practitioners better achieve the aim of public engagement, enabling a more inclusive and nuanced discussion about the form and style of speculative design.” (Barendregt and Vaage, 2021)
Dunne and Raby's “Speculative Everything” strengthen the analogy, arguing how both thought experiments and speculative design encourages the audience to investigate possibilities in an imaginative way and step out of reality to explore new perspectives. (Dunne and Raby, 2013)
While in “Speculative Design as Thought Experiments” the authors test the some criteria between thought experiments and speculative design on a set of design projects, I became curious how we can use the thought experiment itself as a design research method:
How would one design artifacts to facilitate the dialog on the experiments? How could one design an artifact to communicate and illustrate something so abstract to an audience? How to engage the public through those artifacts? How may participants find different analogies to current public controversies in the same thought experiment? How can a design method based on thought experiments help in co-creation and participatory design approaches, while working with innovation, businesses and cross-disciplinary environments? - Maria Jędryszek
The takeaway (the Violet disc)
Here’s a teaser of your future if you will try the method we’re slowly proposing: adapted from “Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments” by Martin Cohen, a series of mental gymnastics designed to broaden the mind and make it more supple.
Last thoughts from Maria’s explorations these past two weeks (the Shiny disc)
The weeks’ work was to find the relation between thought experiments and speculative design with the aim of adding to the researcher’s method we’re working on.
Maria’s biggest sensation came with noticing the relation between the thoughts and the physical:
“Thought experiments use metaphorical physical objects, but they’re thought experiments: you don’t necessarily put a demon and see if it opens doors… yet you do use everyday objects.
And with speculative design, those objects come to life.
That relation: on one side, a metaphysical story, and on another, physical artifacts that have an imaginary way of working. When an iron can help you think about the world and then become a boat. That second type of imagination in order to understand a concept is noteworthy.” - Maria Jędryszek
