Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 137! Repositioning Speculative Design...
Good morning experimental alterations and radical altercations,
We hope that you had a wonderful Earth Day (April 22nd) and world book day (April 23) – for this unique entanglement of a 48 hour period, we have three book related recommendations to offer:
For some reason, we Googled “today” and came across all the events that are happening today – today is in fact many special days: Audubon Day, DNA Day, International Guide Dogs Day, National Help a Horse Day, National Kids and Pets Day, National Pretzel Day, National Richter Scale Day, Remember Your First Kiss Day, and World Intellectual Property Day.
We are not sure what to make of this, other than the proliferation of special days is fascinating. We are not certain how many of these you might be celebrating. If you are, well, drop us a note.
For us, next week is May day, and that is a day worth celebrating. It is both a day celebrating labor and witches: May first is both “May Day” and “Walpurga’s Night"—a day of celebrations that predates christianity: “where witches, demons, and the dead roam the earth, meet, and dance in the period halfway between winter and summer” – what a perfect combination!
Looking back for a moment: On Monday, we did our day-long leadership and innovation workshop for start-ups in the alternative energy sector with our Austrian partners. We workshoped an approach to “leadership” that is far less individual and “leadership style” centric – and more focused on how systems “lead." The group of participants from all over Europe were really connected with this approach and so we managed to go quite deep and collectively generate a number of new techniques and tools.
We had many interesting moments in the workshop. Two that stood out for participants:
Workshopping these two areas of infrastructure leads to many new tools, techniques, and environmental suggestions. If you are curious about any of this, drop us an email, and we would be really excited to share more with you.
Next week, we will be giving the second of our three monthly lectures on innovation for a big pharma organization. Our focus will be a deep dive into Exaptation Processes (-- really things we have been discussing over the last couple of weeks):
And all of this brings us back to “speculation"...
Last week in the newsletter, we introduced how we are using the concept of speculation and speculative practices. We jumped right into how we use the term in a very practical manner. We showcased how we use it in workshops and other innovation practices.
While it is great to jump right into practices, it is also worth pausing for a moment, rewinding a little bit, and reflecting on the various practices that might be found under the umbrella of this term, “speculation."
Rewind.
Today, speculation is a fashionable term. It is used as a call to model “the preferable, probable, plausible, and possible” by all sorts of futurists and trend analysts. This is quite simply another version of “future backwards” design and all of its profound limitations in regards to creativity.
But, “speculative design” has a richer history than the current use by futurists and trend analysts. The critical design community has done quite a bit to develop a critical alternative approach. Fiona Raby, Anthony Dunne, and others developed the term as a critical form of design that investigates the outcomes of technology in a critical, non-neutral manner. Here, Speculative Design takes technologies as something that changes and makes us anew—and thus that which should be taken seriously, rather than mindlessly accepted as “better." The powerful speculative aspect in all of this is that Speculative Design proposes and explores alternative techno-social possibilities beyond the demands of current use, and commercial purpose.
And this is what this approach to speculative design can afford us: The goal of this is not to predict the future; that cannot be done, despite what the trend analysts might claim. Rather, the goal is to open up a space for new speculative lines of action to emerge—new vectors, headings, and potential variations.
To do this, Speculative Design begins by taking into account our emerging realities (environmental, political, social, etc.):
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
~ Isabelle Stengers
For us, the question is always a practical one: how do we do this? – how can we become “realists of a larger reality” that goes beyond the limits of the known and the imaginable?
Stengers, goes further than much of what passes as Speculative Design today (but is really just mundane attempts to model “the preferable, probable, plausible, and possible”). She brings us back to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, perhaps the first English speaker to use the term “creativity” in the modern sense in the 1920’s. Whitehead, in his late work Process and Reality (an absolutely key text on creativity), framed his work as a “speculative philosophy”:
“this course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy… and to defend it as a method productive of important knowledge”
– and when he says “productive of important knowledge," he is referring to the productive capacities of the new to produce genuinely new knowledges. And this is what is critical to creativity as a practice.
Now, just to be clear, we are digging into this history not for the sake of history or setting the records straight. Whitehead offers us today something far more important. First, he draws attention to William James radical method of pragmaticism. Whitehead frames this pragmatism not a philosophy but a method of evaluation:
“everything must be put to an actual test (experiment) and evaluated not for what it “is” – but what effects it has."
This is a radical experimental claim that cuts through disembodied speculation of so much brainstorming, ideation, and even abductive reasoning. And it should resonate with readers who remember our telling of how crows use traffic lights or how exaptative processes lead from fish to land creatures or dinosaurs to birds.
It is never what something “is”; it is always a question of “what can it do?”
The “is"—identity and truth—follow action.
For Whitehead, a speculative method that draws upon James is one that is an active probing testing “art of effects”:
“What can it do?”
And here is the most important aspect of this: what something can do, is ultimately only knowable in and through the doing.
At some point, ideational conjecture reaches its end. Ideation can go no further – “the preferable, probable, plausible, and possible” will only tell us what we already know. Ideation helps us write the future as if it were just the present with a different fashion sense.
But an “art of effects” is speculative in a very different manner: rather than a truth preceding an idea (which is always the case in future backwards ideation of “the preferable, probable, plausible, and possible"), effects become true: As something novel is done with something in a new manner, the novel effects acquire a new factual truth. From the perspective of innovation, it is not about “where it comes from, but where it leads to.” (William James)
And where it leads to—that is a hands-on experimental and speculative question. It is always totally and only made in the doing. And the doing needed to engage with the new, is an experimental doing that needs to “block” or refuse the existing (this was the focus of last week's newsletter).
The critical question for innovation is not to deny that ideation plays a role. Of course it does—it is just that the development of concepts separate from a co-emergent enactive experimental practice will inevitably lead us back to the known. Thinking that emerges from the middle of experimental action is what Whitehead and Stengers wish to understand as “speculative." Why? Because of its emergence as something that accompanies a weak effect, it is potentially on its way to acquiring a novel truth. We thus speculatively and experimentally carry it forward towards a novel heading. And this heading is conceptually emerging as speculation in the midst of action. Speculation in this formulation is never distinct from an experimental practice of blocking the known and experimenting with novel effects: “What else can it do?."
We cannot know what something can be(come) until we engage with it in a new manner. Thus, speculation is not a form of future pprediction; rather, it is a creative method.
“What might happen if we do this?...”
The “answer” to this will only emerge in action.
Why? – Can’t we pretty accurately predict what will most likely happen?
Of course we can—this is what AI can do so well. But this model of prediction is only a statistical extension of the known; it cannot account for anything that might be genuinely qualitatively new.
And this—the predictable—is not the focus or goal of a speculative experiment in the manner in which we are defining it. The focus of speculation is the qualitatively new.
In experimentally engaging with “what might happen if we do this?” we are actively curious about what novel effects might emerge if we actually do this – and not just simulate it by other means (simulation is not speculation, nor is it ever disruptive innovation). But we are not just interested in any form of novelty. We are deliberately blocking forms of novelty that are quantitative extensions of what exists (developmental innovation).
This is a critical point in regards to AI and various simulation processes (from digital doubles to computational modeling): because experimental novel effects are taking advantage of all sorts of bits of noise, chance, and emerging in the moment accident to open up a qualitatively novel trajectory, they cannot be simulated.
A qualitatively novel engagement will potentially use some novel, unspecified aspect of something in a wholly novel manner. And any approach to pre-specification would rely on known ways of identifying salient components of things. What is critical in understanding the context of a speculative method is that all the possible conditions of the experimental meeting of things in action cannot objectively be prespecified because they do not exist until they come into being via an experiment that asks, “What might happen if we do this?”
There is a mad generosity in this:
“One cannot anticipate all possible future innovations by simply listing all possible combinations of prior ones: it is impossible to know what features of those earlier goods might be useful in the future because new goods and services can invent completely novel uses of old ones.”
~ Stuart Kauffman.
This is the critical aspect of what might be called an “empirical speculative” approach to creativity: One can only pre-specify all the known uses, purposes and identity of some thing. But this does not, in any way, encompass all that it might participate in. Why?
Radical Innovation is “empirical” because it can only emerge (and be known) through doing – it cannot be known by theory, ideation, or any other method in advance. And it is “speculative” because it involves a method of qualitative blocking—a qualitative refusal of what exists—that pushes one's experiments towards something (non-existent and therefore unknown) that is qualitatively new.
In the last two newsletters, we introduced the importance of how we speculate at a qualitative threshold:
“In all of these experiments (with which we are co-evolving) they are asking: “Have we now crossed a qualitative threshold and developed a novel/disruptive approach to our matter of concern?”:
But, here is the thing… Based on what we just described, does this novel qualitative threshold prexist? Is it something that we are just probing towards? Can we accurately say: “have we now crossed a qualitative threshold?”
Clearly, it cannot pre-exist if it is genuinely novel. Thus, our iterative experiments are not “exploratory” in the sense of charting an existing (but unknown to us) landscape in search of a pre-existing region that is qualitatively different. So no, we are not simply noticing that we are crossing a qualitative threshold.
Our practice needs to be one that recognizes that we are in the business of co-making a novel qualitative threshold. We are co-emerging with the new via our experimental speculative practice: where what is decisive “is not where it comes from but what it leads to," and what it leads to is the qualitatively novel. It is, as Octavia Butler puts it:
“There is nothing new under the sun – but there are new suns."
If we don’t recognize this, then we are not engaging in a speculative practice; we are just dressing up the present in the clothes of what we imagine the future to be. Which is all to say—when we ask: “Have we now crossed a qualitative threshold?"—we are not asking a question of "discovery"; we are asking a speculative question – “How are we making this emerging qualitative threshold and what does it potentially entail?”
Here, in a qualitatively novel speculative practice, making, doing, and thinking (conceptually speculating) come together in a very unique manner. A fundamental part of what helps in the co-emergence of something qualitatively novel emerging is how we conceptualize it in the midst of the experiment. Just because we are critiquing ideation, brainstorming, and related practices does not mean that thinking plays no critical role in the innovation process. Far from it, it is critical. It is just that the ideas are not ones that preceded the experimental practice; rather, they emerge from the midst of it.
And this leads us to our next topic for the newsletter: Over the next few weeks, we will also be exploring the topic of innovation and AI.
Before we leave you, here is something worth adding to your calendars – the 2024 Varela International Symposium: Sentience and Intelligence: AI, the More-Than-Human, and Us is happening in late May. As one of the key yearly symposiums on enactive practices, it is always interesting. This year, it is of special interest to us as they are turning part of their attention to the question of AI. The enactive approach to innovation has much to say on this as it strongly critiques and refuses the computational approach to sentience and cognition—without ruling out the sentience of artificial beings, etc. And as this newsletter argues, you cannot pre-specify what might happen based on existing possibilities in regards to the qualitatively new – then AI is highly challenged when it comes to the production of qualitative novelty. We will be in attendance – and hope to see you there as well: May 24-26 virtual and in person by donation.
And this leads us to our next topic for the newsletter: Over the next few weeks, we will also be exploring the topic of innovation and AI.
Till next week, keep experimenting and speculating to acquire a novel truth.
Till next volume 138,
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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