BOOKS THAT SWERVED MY THINKING IN 2024: Part One

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

The end of the calendar year tempts everyone to make Best or Favorite lists. This call is usually siren-like in that it’s nearly impossible to resist and you usually end up crashing upon the rocks of taste, which are personal but also friendship-imperillingly important to everyone.

Still, here I am, as December bleeds out, lashing myself to my rickety ship. But instead of Best or Favorite reads of the year, I’m going to publish a brief series about books in 2024 that occupied and swerved my thinking. By “swerved” I mean something specific — namely, books that sent my thinking about the world, myself, and/or my work off on a new trajectory, and a trajectory that’s held.

Few books have swerved my thinking more in the past decade than Sara Hendren’s What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World. Sara is an artist, writer, scholar, design researcher, and overall deep thinker about how people exist in the world as embodied. Her work comes out of disability studies, a line of research that problematizes social, political, legal, and philosophical notions of health and well-being. Key to disability studies is the definition of disability itself, moving from a “medical model” of disability — one in which disability is a problem with an individual body that needs to be medically “fixed” to conform with the ideal healthy body — to a relational, social model in which disability results from a misalignment between a body and the (built) environment. A person in a wheelchair becomes disabled when confronting an entrance that only offers stairs, for example; provide a ramp, and she is no longer disabled.

I’d been reading around in the disability literature for a few years before I came across Sara’s book. I’m professionally interested in the philosophical problems raised by the deeply odd fact and experience of having a body and a mind that thinks about and experiences it, including the feeling of body ownership and the identification (and mis-identification) of our bodily and mental states. Wade into the philosophical and psychological literatures about bodies and selves, and your intuitions and theoretical commitments quickly collide with the accounts of all sorts of confounding subjects — those who deny ownership of their own limbs, or who can’t recognize themselves in mirrors, or who suffer from phantom-limb pain, and on and on.

These cases populate the literature but prove exceedingly rare in general. Misalignment between body and world, however, is common and arguably universal. Sara’s book and related work uses design and engineering to ground the abstract philosophical problems of bodies and ability in people’s everyday lives. Design teaches that many problems don’t (and shouldn’t) call for “fixing” the body but instead demand rethinking the way the world is built for bodies. My father walked with crutches from age 6 on after surviving polio, and I knew him only as someone who could navigate the world well in wonderfully ingenious ways except when infrastructural decisions made navigation impossible. When he was a state district judge, one of the courthouses in his jurisdiction could only be entered via a long flight of stairs. The court had never had a disabled judge before; the simple fact of him led to a ramp being built that anyone could use, fundamentally altering the relationship between the legal system and those in the community that come into contact with it.

What else could design reveal? Much, it turns out. How do we think about a future worth striving for in a useful and meaningful way?

Swerve Book #1 of 2024 Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby provides some Big Ideas and tools for doing so.

The first big revelation in design literature (for me anyway), one worth being reminded of often, is that we live in a world of choice. This fact often eludes us, though, as the goal of infrastructure is to disappear, to become assumptive. To think about the design of the products we use, the spaces we traverse and inhabit, where and how and when we work and play, is to vivify these choices so that we might reexamine these assumptions.

Dunne & Raby describe speculative design as an alternative to problem-solving design (creating products for market, e.g.), one in which “design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality” (p. 2). They write:

This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. (p. 2)

One provocative way of creating such space is to imagine and even to create objects for everyday life (food prep and consumption, lighting, bathing) that exemplify a possible future (e.g., in which waste from one process becomes input into others). We don’t just think about what a flying car might look like, we think about what world a flying car would fit into, including the home (with garage?), workplace, public transportation, etc.

The book is full of examples of speculative design (some more successful than others), but I particularly loved the discussion of “critical design.” Critical design is a species of speculative design that shows what could be while also revealing the shortcomings of current reality and practice and the values that underlie them. My favorite example is the authors’ own creation called Huggable Atomic Mushrooms. These plushie mushroom clouds are to help people feel less terrified of nuclear Armageddon by microdosing their fears while also exposing the absurdity of nuclear weapons and their ever-present annihilatory potential.

This stuff alone is worth picking up the book, but for me the most mileage came from Dunne & Raby’s discussion of how to think about the success of speculative and critical design:

Critical design needs to be closer to the everyday; that’s where its power to disturb lies. A critical design should be demanding, challenging, and if it is going to raise awareness, do so for issues that are not already well known. Safe ideas will not linger in people’s minds or challenge prevailing views but if it is too weird, it will be dismissed as art, and if too normal, it will be effortlessly assimilated. If it is labeled as art it is easier to deal with but if it remains design, it is more disturbing; it suggests that the everyday life as we know it could be different, that things could change. (p. 43)

The challenge, then, is to create design that “sits in this world, the here-and-now, while belonging to another yet-to-exist one” (p. 43). One that fits too comfortably in either the current or possible world doesn’t have the necessary force to dislodge our thinking about what is and what could be.

How My Thinking Was Swerved

Will be dismissed as art. That’s the kicker for me. To categorize something as art is, of course, to give it a certain cultural power, but it’s also a way of sealing off that thing as merely in the realm of ideas, as something that doesn’t meaningfully push on the world.

I don’t completely agree that art is so easily dismissed, but I understand the point. We could think about potential futures by considering what artifacts will fill our museums. But thinking about museums themselves as physical spaces — where they should be located, how we travel to and enter them, what time we have for them, how much they should cost, how a wide range of people can experience them — forces us to imagine, and re-imagine, entire forms of life.

I’m responsible for the academic direction of a college, and I’m constantly thinking about how to prepare students to thrive in a world of evolving challenge. Higher ed institutions also shape the world to some degree even as we do our preparatory work. Dunne & Raby (and disability studies in general) present a compelling case that to think meaningfully about the future and what we should value is to rethink the everyday. To rethink the everyday, you have to notice it. To notice the everyday is to imagine the unsafe idea in practice, which is the hard work of design, disability studies, and so many other disciplines, particularly philosophy.

The rise of algorithms of grievance and the politics of unfairness have contributed to the shrinking of Americans’ moral imaginations. The next four years will likely apply further constrictive pressure, as the powerful and wealthy few will strive to replace collective action with fulfilling their particular desires and make their choices the country’s. We need ways and encouragement to think much more expansively about worlds of choice and our choice of worlds.

A few more swerve-worthy books are on the way. In the meantime, feel free to use the comments below to include some books that moved your thinking in 2024.

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