Introduction

Speculative Design is a methodological approach that can be a huge tool for anthropologists. Designers use it as a creative device for generating questions about futures, technological or otherwise. By working in collaboration with designers and using speculative design techniques, anthropologists and designers together could engage with communities and specific social groups for understanding social problems and imagining alternative futures. Speculative Design, if used anthropologically, can be an approach for generating processes of participative and socially informed innovation. With this text is on the one side to present Speculative Design, while at the same time speculating how it could work for anthropologists as a tool for social innovation.

The affair between anthropology and design

In the last decade, there has been a methodological openness in the social sciences to practices that are more creative and interventional – the so called post-representational turn. Within these experiments with form we find the repertoire of inventive methods that explore the happening of the social (Lury and Wakeford 2012); another example are the live methods (Back and Puwar 2012), claimed as a more artful approach to social research. It is within this search for creative forms of interventional practice that the recent anthropological research through design is included.

Anthropologists and designers already have a long lasting affair – let’s call it an epistemic affair. Tim Ingold’s anthropology with design – meaning in correspondence with, rather than of design – is an example of this affair, though one that involves the appropriation of design to anthropology, rather than actually establishing acollaboration between the two areas of work – it is more like a anthropology flirting with design. Another important area to be mentioned in this affair is the field of Design Anthropology (Gunn et al 2013; Gunn and Donovan 2012; Clarke 2011) (Murphy 2016; Clarke 2016) (2013). This version of the affair is much more collaborative and practice based. Design Anthropology presents itself as a new style of knowing, based on co-creations between anthropologists and designers. Design Anthropology can also be broadly conceived as research through design, which has gained growing interest in the last decade due on one side to a ‘designerly’ turn in the social sciences (Mazé 2016: 60), and on the other, to a social shift in design.

Both the designerly turn in the social science and the social shift in design have been criticized by each of the parts involved: while the social shift in design has been criticized (by anthropologists) for the use of an acritical notion of the social (Clark 2016: 74), the designerly turn in social sciences has been criticized (by designers and/or design sensitive social scientist) for relying on their own usual linear, discursive, representational methods (Halse and Boffi 2016: 93). Despite both versions’ claim to interdisciplinary, the fact is that there is not much communication between these two epistemic cultures (Gaspar 2018a; 2018b): either we end up with a designerly form of anthropology which at the end is still anthropology, or a social science inspired version of design which at the end of the day is still design.

Speculative/Critical Design

Speculative Design, in turn, is a critical, experimental and reflexive turn that emerged in Design by the end of the 1990’s, as a critique to the market orientation of mainstream design and its focus on products. Also known as Critical Design, Speculative Design does not aim to generate new products through the design process, but rather new questions. Speculative Design, thus, stands for Design as much as the “Writing Culture” stands for Anthropology. It emerged as a reflexive mode of critique among designers to the narratives of progress, questioning the idea that technological innovation is an endless and linear process.Although Speculative Design emerged as a mode of criticism in regard to market- oriented design and especially the unquestioned progressive narratives involved in technological innovation (Dunne and Raby 2013), with time, it lost much of the critical dimension that was once in its origin. Soon it became absorbed and appropriated by design companies as an instrument to better communicate new products or as a method to generate ideas for new products. This critical dimension of Speculative Design is what fascinates me as an anthropologist and it is something that I believe the collaborations with anthropologists could restore, if engaging with speculative design processes.

Speculative Design, in theory, may have a lot of potential for anthropology because of its methodologies, which rely on creative techniques. Those techniques are characterized by the use of fiction and material practices such as the construction of critical prototypes and probes for the construction of possible or alternative technological futures. Although Design Anthropology is already and established field, the collaborations between Anthropology and Speculative Design in specific have not been explored so far. Design Anthropology usually does not involve collaborations with Speculative Design in specific, but rather with other design areas with which anthropology already has a tradition of collaboration, such as participatory design or architecture. Some design anthropologists are actually very critical of Speculative Design: for example, Kjaersgaard and Boer (2016) point out Speculative Designers closed use of objects. Design objects, they argue, should be introduced for producing a critical process where critique is “not encapsulated in the speculative objects themselves” (ibid: 230).

Speculative Design, in turn, has been seen from a distance by anthropologists, who criticize it for being authoral (DiSalvo 2016: 142) and for producing objects stemming from engagements with controversies that are usually prepared for display at conventional design venues – as in the work of Dunne and Raby (2013) (Binder 2016: 268); according to these critical views, critical/speculative design objects are meant to be read as texts, separate from contexts of production and use (Kjaersgaard and Boer 2016: 230), and therefore considered as anti-empirical from an anthropological point of view: “as delightful as it may be to let the mind wander into imaginative thought-constructions and what-if scenarios, speculative thinking isfraught with the temptation to lose sight of concrete limitations and constraints, or to gloss over very real controversies and conflicting viewpoints” (ibid: 8). To Kjaersgaard and Boer (2016: 229) it would be necessary to ground speculation in the specificities of lived experience by moving Speculative Design into the field.

As much interesting as grounding speculation can be, making anthropology more speculative would be even more so. My research about design cultures and my contact with Speculative Design in specific has reflected in my former pedagogic activity, both in terms of content and form. For example I used objects of contemporary material culture to speculatively to open up new stories, as an alternative to the study of objects’ stories or their biographies and their ‘social lives’ which motivate material culture studies in anthropology. My use of objects for speculating about their lives was inspired by speculative design. In two consecutive academic years, I organized an exhibition with students that I called ‘Idiotic objects for social research’. I also published one article (2018b) based on these pedagogic experiments, referring to them as an example of what a speculative anthropology could be (both in terms of pedagogy and research).

Design Anthropology + Speculative Design = Speculative Design Anthropology

Wondering how interesting it could be researching practices at the intersection between Design Anthropology and Speculative Design, eager to explore what a

*Speculative Design Anthropology* could be and dreaming about Speculative Design Anthropology as a new field that fills a gap within the field of Design Anthropology, I embarked in a small fieldwork experience: in September 2019, I participated in a Speculative Design workshop in Rome, which was for me an opportunity to engage and acquire tools from this field, with the intention to experiment them at the intersection with anthropology. Some of the tensions of this experience are worth to be noted, which I will illustrate in the following section.Grounding it: “Neorural futures” workshop

“Neorural futures” was the name of a workshop that took place in Rome, on the first week September 2019. It was organized by a European project about speculative design and education called Speculative.Edu. This workshop proposed to reimagine how rurality in the near future would be like – 10 years from now.

It had 40 participants from all over the world, including myself. We were divided into five smaller groups. Each group was given a predefined context to work with, a geographic place. In my group, the context was Caselle in Pittari, a town in the south of Italy, while others had Lushoto in Tanzania, Chernobyl, the moon, and a place in Sweden. In my group, I was the only anthropologist among designers and an architect.

The aim was to construct a ‘scenario’ about how our place (in our case, Caselle in Pittari) was going to be like 10 years now. We started the process of speculative design by following the usual design method, which a linear step-by-step process (the conceptual phase always precedes the materialization phase): this means we started from the analysis, which includes the research, brainstorming, mapping and other visualization ‘techniques’, before materializing it – there would be an exhibition with our scenarios at the end, to be commented by the senior speculative designers of the project; we were all working for that exhibition.

In my group, we started studying the context that had been given to us. We were instructed to “research daily life, and immerse ourselves in the scenario” for understanding how things are changing related to global issues (food, migration, climate change, poverty, etc), a process which is similar to what anthropologists do, although a very simplified version of it. What we did as ‘research’ was exploring the information that was given to us about the place – exploring the map with the information previously collected by the team who organized the workshop, watching videos they had produced about the place; we were also given access to statistic data about the population of that place.A great part of the contents presented us new agricultural projects going on in the place. One of these projects was “rural hack” – a group of people who moved to Caselle in Pittari “to go back to the roots”, as they said, and who “developed open source approaches to agriculture”, “approaching the territory as their lab” (in their words) and “promoting more sustainable agricultural practices” and ways of life.

As part of the brainstorm process, each of us was supposed to identify one aspect about the place that we thought was interesting to think with. In one of the videos, the ‘rural kackers’ referred to a recently created ritual, the ‘Palio del grano’, a sort of a festival they created for celebrating crops – every ear there is a celebration where different groups enter a competition with their crops. As one of the speakers from this project told us, “the quantity of grain produced in this town is not that much, but they created “Palio del Grano” as a means to generate new relationships among people, strengthening community bounds and recreating identities”.

Inspired by this narrative, I suggested to the group: ‘what if‘ in 10 years now (our timeframe), there was in Caselle in Pittari a sort of a Lab for Inventing Traditions, that would design custom made traditions and would export traditions for other places in the world, for example places which are boring and need new ‘traditions’? (Or if, instead of ‘selling’ traditions, this lab could rather open source traditions, and thus one of the objects we could produce for the exhibition would be a sort of open-source document with instructions on how to create a new tradition… My colleagues commented that this idea as “too extreme” because in their mind, “traditions are supposed to be ancient, to have some substance”. I assumed speculative design was about irony and provocation, I told them. The ‘rural hack’ project was presented to us as something progressive, (the good sustainable practices, etc), so there was a sort of pre-packed narrative about rural hacking which I was trying to be ironic about, but it did not work as such because our tutors, and also one of the members of our team, were involved in these neo-rural agricultural projects, so they were in fact the producers of those versions of alternative ‘neorurality’, which makes it hard to be ironic about. They were insiders. Thus, no one was available to question that narrative and there was no possibility to imagine anything outside this sort of belief. There was no ‘outside’ perspective and no predisposal to that, and therefore no anthropologicaldistance could be introduced in the process. Any critical perspective about the scenario presented to us was thus foreclosed.

At a certain point, one of the rural hackers in the group picked up the topic of ‘traditions’ that I raised and suggested “tradition is innovation” (writing in the white board we were using for brainstorming), which according to her translates very well what they are doing in Caselle in Pittari as rural hackers… and the group adopted that idea as a motto. Although this was a total subversion of what I was trying to provoke, my colleagues ended up developing a scenario where the main character was a neo- rural youtuber living in Caselle in Pittari, just reproducing stereotypes about an idealized rural life. The comments we received from the senior designers of the project to our work were not very flattering, thus, from the speculative design point of view, it was not considered interesting work.

Perhaps this was just bad luck with the group, as another colleague anthropologist had a much fruitful process of generating questions in her group, but this is just one of the examples of my unsuccessful attempts to open things up that did work in the design process, and it illustrates what the difficulties of the relationship between anthropology and speculative design. The disciplinary design method that still shapes Speculative Design, with its linearity, does not create much space for opening up preconceived ideas, in this case a normative vision about what neo-rurality should be, preventing new ideas to emerge.

Between prescription and description

This text is meant as nothing but a rough exploration of the idea that an engagement of anthropologists with Speculative Design can be a tool for social innovation. Design can provide anthropology not just with other kind of media and tools – visual tools, communication tools, graphics, design methods, scenarios, probes – but also with a different epistemics: the skills required for making projects, which is a prescriptive kind of activity; at the same time, as the example illustrated, designers sometimes lack a sensibility and maybe the devices for opening up imagination from learning fromspecific social contexts – in other words, designers lack description tools and a descriptive sensibility that an ethnographic perspective usually provides to anthropologists, allowing them to open up perspectives, going out from the insider perspective. Speculative Design too often develops abstract and artistic concepts that are self-referential, and therefore it often remains artistic, producing no other effect than being exhibited in art galleries. Rather than reinforcing this epistemic divide between prescription and description, we should rather cultivate the affair, with all the tensions and frictions: an affair between design culture and anthropological culture. I imagine (but this is assumedly speculation) that the result from that affair can be Speculative Design Anthropology.