Is there a possible future for design?

Faced with a world that insists on repeating its failures with growing sophistication, perhaps the most radical question design can ask today is not “how do we solve it?”, but “what if?”. Against the pragmatic impulse to convert every future into an innovation agenda, speculative design, and its less tameable ally, magical realism, proposes opening cracks in the real, where improbable ideas can breathe. This is not about forecasts or trends, but about critical imagination. About displacing the present through the absurd, through lyricism, through the impossible.

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In a field increasingly colonized by technological solutions, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby point to a necessary detour: what if design served less to shape objects and more to tense ideas? In Speculative Everything, the authors present projects that do not aim to convince or become products, but to disturb, suggest, and unsettle. Not about what the future will be, but about what we might wish for.

This way of designing abandons the tyranny of plausibility. It rejects the easy optimism of big techs and the fetish for predictable scenarios. Instead, it turns toward literature, philosophy, and art. It is the metaphor, not the proof, that reaches the imagination. By incorporating magical realism as a design language, design assumes that the future is not a destination to be reached, but a field of possibilities to be cultivated. Small distortions of the present, too subtle for engineering radar but powerful enough to reprogram perceptions, become tools of critique and enchantment. It is possible to design a world where doubt is more fertile than certainty.

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Perhaps the most urgent role of design today is to restore to us this capacity to imagine with seriousness. To think of the world not as it should function, but as it could be. And, in that imagination, to broaden the margins of the possible.

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Speculative Everything Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming With

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

MIT Press

$34.95

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