Wednesday’s class discussion acknowledged that most artistic imaginings of the future–particularly in science fiction–tend towards pessimism. From nuclear hellscapes, to invasive surveillance, to a world without food or water, we don’t have a lot of optimism when we imagine the near-future. In “On Speculative Design,” Benjamin Bratton gives us permission to move away from the realm of pessimistic prediction and towards optimistic speculation. He argues that the concrete, “nuts and bolts” nature of speculation–a practice which acknowledges the state of the present and wonders about the state of the future–does not disqualify speculation from being a way of “figuring of fundamental alternatives” to the state of the present (Bratton). Even though speculative models are “predictive,” they can “search the space of actual possibility” rather than just “concluding that the future is lost” (Bratton). Implicitly, Bratton suggests speculative design as a means of positively influencing the future rather than just passively guessing at the course of the future.
Bratton goes on to outline what speculative design might look like in different areas of scientific research. He discusses the use of cutting-edge technologies in object-based art, but he does not address what speculative design might look like in the holistic world-building of spaces like literature. This challenge of building an optimistic speculative world is something that has stumped me a bit in the context of our object-making project. I find that each world I am drawn to construct is in some way pessimistic. If I pursue a lead into an idea for an optimistic vision of the future, it feels bland and uninspiring. Even though the idea of, say, carbon neutral world peace in 2050 is a pretty radical notion, I find myself far more drawn to imagining disasters like nuclear apocalypse.
I think that I’m averse to optimistic narrative speculation because I don’t know how to make this optimistic world into something that doesn’t feel boring and unrealistic. We’ve spoken in class about cognitive estrangement, or the idea of unsettling a viewer/reader through the eeriness of tweaking a familiar context just enough to make a viewer/reader do a double take. The optimistic future feels unrealistic because it seems so very unlikely. The other culprit here is that a radically optimistic future seems hard to conjure in a way that isn’t overly preachy. How can one engage in Bratton’s form of speculative design without opting in to tedious moralizing? How do you build a world that is engaging, hopeful, and just complicated enough to still be interesting?
If people have them, I’d love to get some suggestions of literature/film/etc. that engages in interesting, non-preachy, and plausible optimistic narrative speculations. I’m struggling to pull myself out of the totalistic, robots-will-kill-us-allpatterns of the science fiction that I’ve consumed thus far in my life.
Work Cited
Bratton, Benjamin. “On Speculative Design.” Launch party, UCSD Speculative Design Major, 10 February 2016, San Diego, California. Launch party remarks.
Climate Change in Media and Design 
Thank you for expressing your frustration and struggle! I think many people, including myself, struggle with modeling the future through art and design while balancing pessimism and optimism to find some sort of truth about what our future is likely to look like. Extending Bratton’s warning against the dangers of unchecked pessimism in future design, I wonder to what extent pessimism can warp our mindsets such that we end up creating a future that confirms our negative speculation. Perhaps if we maintained a greater degree of optimism and realness when scouting out possibilities, we would discover we have more positive options than we realize, and greater ability to pursue them than we give ourselves credit for.
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I really appreciate the conversation that was had in this thread about optimism and pessimism in our models of the future, and how they intersect with (un)believability. I wonder how Bratton’s own fear of profit-driven speculative design can be integrated into this discussion of future visions: it seems that a speculative design that is both optimistic and believable is most vulnerable to becoming a “predictive” model which can be exploited by predicting the consumer trends of the future.
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I don’t have any specific suggestions for optimistic literature or art that feels believable, but I do think a lot of the materials we’ve looked at in class so far do a good job of striking a really interesting mix between optimism and pessimism. So many of them could be pessimistic if read through a certain lens or optimistic if looked at through another, giving us reasons for both sorrow and hope, perhaps showing us a world that has devastated humanity while reminding us that other things keep going. I think it’s extremely interesting how that kind of double viewpoint can be really comforting, both despite and because of the way it reminds us that we as humans are not a central component to the world.
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I also find it very difficult to imagine an optimistic future but mostly because I think nothing is entirely “optimistic” or “pessimistic”, “good” or “bad”. The complexity of life is that everything contains both sides of the spectrum. Especially when thinking about a future which contains the whole world we are familiar with, it will inherently contain both the good and bad. Maybe this is actually an optimistic way to look at the future? I think New York 2140 does an especially good job at portraying the complicated mix of good and bad; that what one person might view as a pessimistic version of the future, another views as optimistic. Before reading the novel I thought sea level rise and city flooding was the ultimate pessimistic view of the future but after hearing Kim Stanley Robinsons imagining of how we would live in this future world, it doesn’t seem all that bad.
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Pessimistic design’s ability to strike fear and thus encourage action might be the reason why artistic content about the future lack optimism, however, I believe that we should not be too pessimistic in the art that we create to educate the public about the future of our planet. The level of pessimism we are currently using may cause many to disbelieve climate change as the grave, exaggerated predictions made by artists of the past do not reflect current life and thus loses the credibility of the art’s message. For example, several movies made to portray an apocalyptic, climate-changed future exaggerate several elements of climate change and thus are too extreme to be believable. These viral movies tend to predict life in the near future and its accessibility to viewers in the future causes people to notice the exaggerated predictions made by these films when the predicted year becomes present day. Many joked about the 2009 film, “2012,” and completely disregarded its warnings about a post-apocalyptic world as none of the events featured in the film actually occurred in 2012. This post-apocalyptic clique that artists often present has featured the same level of pessimism and I believe it has caused viewers to notice a pattern in which these predicted events never occur in real life. Thus, the message and warning of a climate-changed future are brushed aside and our world continues with our unchanged habits. I believe that pessimism is a great way to scare people of the future to come, but we must stay realistic when portraying the future of the earth. I don’t think we should focus on being either optimistic or pessimistic, and instead, we should be looking for that middle ground, creating our content with scientific knowledge and being realistic and genuine in our warnings.
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Thank you for this very provocative post, Elizabeth. I think it gets at a really pressing concern re: how to position oneself as a designer, thinker, creative, and scholar in the face of unimaginably complex problems and terribly uncertain futures… and most importantly, how to do so in a way that feels engaging.
I don’t think it’s an accident that your attempt at “an optimistic vision of the future … feels bland and uninspiring.” To echo Kellie, utopias are boring! It’s easy to imagine a world without problems—we know what that looks like. We just don’t know how to get there—in your words, an optimistic future is both “unrealistic because … very unlikely” and “overly preachy.” It doesn’t feel genuine.
Moreover, as you’re all gesturing at, we’re steeped in a cultural imaginary that favors conflict in both form (as per Jaida’s comment: the “story arc” to which we’re widely accustomed) and content (Kellie’s reminder that conversations around climate change are largely “harm-based,” or Jaire’s comment about futures that don’t feel believable unless they’re at someone’s expense).
So can we make optimistic interesting? If so, how?
Dunne and Raby warn against the pitfalls of “design’s inbuilt optimism,” specifically the impulse to channel “energy and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there” (2). Bratton similarly reminds us that “a cup of demystification beats a pound of remediation”—rather than launching into solution-mode in the face of wicked problems, we might instead cultivate a historical understanding of the preconditions (political, economic, cultural) for the structures and institutions that we take for granted. Doing so could help to pinpoint the misguided ways in which we interact with said structures, and help us to imagine new, alternative forms of being in the world.
Perhaps this means redefining the very position of optimism. Speculative and critical design eschew progress as a motivating vector, turning instead to alternatives that aren’t necessarily positive or negative, but generative.
I have several recommendations for works of fiction that might be relevant to this conversation (come see in me in office hours!) but here I’ll mention just one: in her comment, Ellen proposes shorter timelines “(literally tomorrow)” and small details. She also suggests tweaking day-to-day “environment-related problems.” Lydia Millet’s novel “How the Dead Dream” offers a model of something like this strategy: the protagonist’s storyline proceeds against the backdrop of a world that is only slowly revealed as collapsing (represented largely through the main character’s increasing concern for extinctions in the fauna). The novel isn’t set in some dystopian future—it’s set in the very real present. Millet’s story asks us to consider how we frame ideas of extinction—what does it mean to be the last of something, what is the value (cultural, scientific, sentimental) inherent in such a state, why does it matter? The novel doesn’t offer an optimistic solution, but it opens up new lines of questioning both about environmental crisis and about our position in the face of said crisis.
So perhaps one way to get out of that utopian/optimistic mode when you’re designing your object would be to think less about what solutions it might offer/represent, and more about what questions it helps to ask.
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I too find the challenge of optimism quite daunting. Your post helps me think more clearly about another approach to optimistic futures: if not a glorious 2050, what would a better tomorrow (literally tomorrow, Sunday) look like? What small detail in my day would signal or motivate a shift in an optimistic direction? Of many methods to approaching this question, two seem most apparent. One, to think of a future 2050 and work backwards, though I would wonder how aligned that kind of process is with a design framework. Two, to analyze how the environment-related problems (~causal problems, e.g. aspects of person-material relationships or person-person or person-nature, etc) play out in daily life and then tweak those. This may be quite in line with the last object exercise from Wednesday’s class.
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The problem stems partially from a cognitive bias, I suspect: psychologically, it is likely easier for people to keep negative thoughts about the future than positive ones. Much of the conversation around climate change is harm-based, so we associate it with negative outcomes.
The reason these utopias might seem boring could be that we KNOW what we want to avoid for the future, but the current problem is HOW to get there. A utopia defines a vision for the future, but we already have some: for example, being carbon-neutral. We no longer feel optimistic. (An interesting utopia is what Kim Stanley Robinson calls an op-topia: a best-case scenario given climate change.)
These two factors, climate change messaging as harm-based & struggles on how to tackle that, might make dystopias more salient.
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I don’t particularly have any examples I can think of for optimistically desired futures, films, or books. However, perhaps the reason it is so hard for us to withdraw from pessimism when using our imaginations for storytelling is because most forms of storytelling we are exposed to (at least in American society) consists of a “story arc”. Story arcs always have a conflict and then have some sort of resolution or “coming to terms” with that conflict by the end of the story arc. This story structure is taught in most film schools and its called Gustav Freytag’s Plot Structure. This structure is what creatives are taught to make a story interesting. Since we have been socialized into thinking of futures and using our imaginations in this way, perhaps it limits us from thinking of optimistic designs that are still engaging.
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Thanks for this post! I think you’re vocalizing a conflict many of us are experiencing when we try to engage in more optimistic speculative design, but I’ll just speak for myself. I have trouble thinking of examples of utopian futures that are “believable” without them still feeling like a nightmare. Something that unsettled me when approaching the texts for this week is how when I thought about speculative design outside of the realm of literature and other media, many of the most salient examples of utopian futures for me kept taking on a fascist or eugenic mode (e.g. Nazism’s vision of an ethnically cleansed world, the American imperialism of Manifest Destiny). These particular examples lie in the speculative cone of “preferable,” but history proves that preferable for some enacts violence on others. Is it because utopian futures aren’t believable unless someone is at the expense? Or is it just that utopian futures aren’t interesting without a major flaw? Maybe these questions are one and the same: believability may inherently make speculative design more interesting.
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