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Touchable Speculation: Crafting Critical Discourse with 3D Printing, Maker Practices, and Hypermapping

Design Practice and Research

In the realm of design, conceptual practices—which take many names, including speculative design—often emerge as a way to explore the cultural, ideological, social, and aesthetic aspects (to name a few) of the built-environment and the objects with which we live our lives. This work often comes from designers who view the value or potential of design beyond the industrial and commercial, and more specifically, beyond the pursuit of profitability.[1] A major contributor to this body of work comes from the London-based design studio [Anthony] Dunne & [Fiona] Raby. In a multi-modal array of scholarly books, publications, projects, and exhibitions, they “use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies.”[2]

They, too, draw on the generative value of the speculative in their book, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming that “propose[s] a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas” and “pose ‘what if’ questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).”[3] Also speaking to the value of the speculative, Ursula Le Guin frames it (here, the “future”) as “a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in, a means of thinking about reality, a method.”[4] In my understanding, speculative pursuits are interdisciplinary, multi-modal, and exist in many places and formats simultaneously. The term belongs to no one practitioner, field, or body of work, but offers a mode to approach something, anything, with the power of “what if.”

[1] See, for instance, James Auger, “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation,” Digital Creativity 24, no. 1 (2013): 11–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.767276; Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge: MIT, 2008); Matthew Malpass, Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practices (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

[2] “About Us,” Dunne & Raby, accessed November 26, 2018, http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/biography.

[3] “Books & Limited Editions: Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming,” Dunne & Raby, accessed November 26, 2018, http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/books/690/0.

[4] Quoted in Eileen Gunn, “How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-your-future-180951169/.

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Speculative + Making = Genealogies, Context, and Naming Matters
“At one time, Ts’ui Pên must have said; ‘I am going into seclusion to write a book,’ and at another, ‘I am retiring to construct a maze.’ Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.” —Jorge Luis Borges, “Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941)
In the next section, “Speculative Making in the Digital Humanities,” I detail my specific usage and interpretation of the terms speculative, making, and their combination in relation to my choice to classify fleshLAB as speculative making. I largely frame the speculative in relation to Johanna Drucker’s work on speculative computing and speculative approaches in creative endeavors, such as art and fiction. I frame making in relation to what has come to be called the mainstream “maker movement,” especially the branch that has been adopted, institutionalized, and (often) reformulated in university education, and Matt Ratto’s critical making. Beyond this framing, these terms and practices are part of a much more expansive genealogy, one that spans many genres of making, of design.

Though certainly conceptual, hands-on practices do not occur solely within academic spaces, nor solely within the fields I will discuss below, I am most interested in the development of these practices and concepts within academic research, scholarship, and pedagogy. Though expansive, interdisciplinary, and diverse, these approaches, in my view, share a commitment to learning with and from things and a desire to pursue these epistemologically-rich sites through hands-on exploration of material objects. Often, this approach manifests in two major scholarly areas: 1) design practice and research and 2) the "maker turn" within the digital humanities (DH).

Though these practices may share several terms and approaches, they have come to be through different contexts and genealogies because of their various locations across the interdisciplinary fields of the humanities and of design. In some ways, you could say they share a common ancestor (a similar gene that has transmuted across fields and expressed itself in various ways), or put differently, a common vision (a similar perspective done differently as a result of disciplinary forces and trajectories). The practices and projects may take on similar qualities, but are often created by people who may have taken very different paths, use different tools, cite different archives, work in different parts of a campus, and attend different conferences.

In “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” Hancock et al. specifically address the interconnectivity between the realms of conceptual design and hands-on, material-focused humanities research in their work on reflective design, a term developed by designer Donald Norman, which they apply to bibliography and textual studies. They utilize this experimental method specifically to defamiliarize the materiality of the book to explore the codex as transmuted from its typical material form.[1] Linking design to DH, they assert:
“Reflective design complements the recent emphasis on critical making[2] in the digital humanities: the embodying of ideas or arguments in things. Ian Bogost’s carpentry,[3] Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeology,[4] and Bruce Sterling’s design fiction[5] are all significant disciplinary touchstones. Part of the human-centered design philosophy of Donald Norman, reflective design foregrounds critical investigation over usability.”[6]

Reflective design is one concept among many similar others based on the conceptual, hands-on exploration of the material form, and bibliocircuitry, one iteration of this cross-disciplinary practice.[7]

Similarly, making within academic fields, specifically (digital) humanities, is just as complex and nuanced, some aspects of which I discuss in more detail throughout this project. Making is not far off from design (i.e. as a form of creative fabrication), but presents perhaps a different, yet interconnected, set of historical and social connotations. The most compelling critiques of making come by way of the more specific critique of maker culture or the mainstream maker movement, and by extension, the dangers of their entry into education.

Despite this, making can be and often is used within humanities frameworks to attempt to learn more about the material world as a way to identify hegemonic, often oppressive, mechanisms—a step required in the process to later remake the material world for the “better”—and, indeed, as a form of unmaking. For example, Hancock et al. suggest that reflective design is a method to transform the authors into “creative agents of change:” “…it is what helps us discover fault lines in the objects, artifacts, or systems being explored […] and in doing so allows us to imagine them otherwise: to see them as alterable rather than immutable; as possibility spaces rather than rigid, inherited structures.”[8]

Design scholar and practitioner Anthony Dunne (whose work is discussed in more detail in the "speculative making" pop-out note above) suggests that design practice and research may “improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment […] to be subverted for more socially beneficial ends.”[9] Opening up the black box, whatever the obfuscated item may be, lets the light in to reveal the inner-workings, and empowers us to look inside to then remake through iteration. These modes of exploration may help us not only uncover that which needs re-designing, but also, the means in which to do so.

As I have hoped to make clear by now, naming matters. Naming materializes through and around classification and is a significant aspect of the ideological development of these projects. The larger context of speculative and making provides a set of tools to classify, distinguish, and situate the spectrum of approaches drawing from these concepts. The terms practitioners select to identify themselves and their projects and practices define the work perhaps just as much as the work itself, often revealing the motivations, context, goals, and conceptual framings of the works, which in turn provides insight to how we might interpret or understand them.

Though fleshLAB is certainly an act of speculative making, it is also, perhaps more broadly, an act of scholarly making. I prefer scholarly making as an umbrella term for its ability to include multiple academic branches, namely research, scholarship, and pedagogy. Scholarly making names research that centers hands-on, material explorations utilized for its unique epistemological value in research, and is enacted not only after the object of study is created, but also during. It redefines knowledge production that “counts” as scholarship beyond the academic article or book.[10] It is also useful to identify how making might be detached from its connotations to the maker movement, and the critiques of its uncritical adoption as defined above, and redefined accordingly. Finally, and more broadly, it suggests an additional mode of working within the material humanities. I, like Borges, wonder what might be revealed when we make books that are labyrinths and labyrinths that are books.

[1] Charity Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation 8, no. 1 (2013): 75.
[2] Hypertext links are used throughout this text. Instead of reproducing the hyperlinks within the quotation, I will maintain the URLs here as footnotes as they were embedded into the original. Link: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2012/03/full-interview-matt-ratto-on-critical-making/.
[3] Link: http://www.bogost.com/blog/carpentry_vs_art_whats_the_dif.shtml.
[4] Link: http://www.amazon.com/What-Media-Archaeology-Jussi-Parikka/dp/0745650260.
[5] Link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html.
[6] Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” 75.
[7] Ibid., 79.
[8] Ibid., 76, emphasis added.
[9] Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge: MIT, 2008), xvi.
[10] Bill Endres also discusses this issue in relation to academic employment practices, specifically tenure and promotion. See: Bill Endres, “A Literacy of Building: Making in the Digital Humanities,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 44–54.