IN 2001, Honda unveiled a new global brand slogan, “The Power of Dreams,” through a series of commercials that eschewed the conventional portrayal of automobiles in favor of speculative meditations on the future. “What would the world be like if its favorite word wasn’t ‘OK’?” one advertisement asked. “What if the word was ‘what if’?” The work of design duo Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who established their studio Dunne & Raby in 1994, arguably revolves around this same question.
While teaching at the Royal College of Art in London from 2005 to 2015, they developed the practice they called critical design—design as a form of critique—into a forum for imagining alternative realities. In their 2013 book Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming , they make clear that speculative design, as it has come to be known, is not about “forecasting the future” but rather about using “what if” questions to speculate on how the present might be different. A decade on, the question is whether speculative design is merely neoliberalism’s academic cloak or a critical way of understanding the tools required for a world of finite resources.
Originally trained in industrial design and architecture, respectively, Dunne and Raby sought from the outset to explore “the gap between reality as we know it” and alternative realities suggested by their critical design proposals. 1 Speculative Everything proposes that instead of accepting a give.
