Is there a possible future for design?

Diante de um mundo que insiste em repetir suas falhas com sofisticação crescente, talvez a pergunta mais radical que o design possa fazer hoje não seja “como resolver?”, mas “e se?”. Contra o impulso pragmático de converter todo futuro em uma agenda de inovação, o design especulativo, e seu aliado menos domesticável, o realismo mágico, propõe abrir rachaduras no real, onde ideias improváveis possam respirar. Não se trata de previsões ou tendências, mas de imaginação crítica. De deslocar o presente pelo absurdo, pelo lirismo, pelo impossível.

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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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