Speculative Everything Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
Reviews
An amazing book that encapsulates ideas about critical and speculative design. The books packs lots of organized works in between two wider chapters. The content may seem like a survey paper but that is the fun part. Some parts are a bit too abstract (need more explanation) and I guess it may be due to the subject of the book. The book strongly challenges the current design practice that is using design to create demand for unreasonable goods. The book tries to widen this perceived scope of design to make it seem like a super power. "With great power comes great responsibility"
Highlights
Using design to ask questions rather than providing answers or solving problems.
(...) it can pull new technological developments into imaginary but believable every day situations so that we can explore possible consequences before they happen.
By presenting people with fictional products, services, and systems from alternative futures people can engage critically with them as citizen-consumers.
Critical design can often be dark or deal with dark themes. (...) Complex emotions are usally ignored in design; nearly every other culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design.