IN CONVERSATI O N WITH da nie l ch arn y INTERVIEW by Mariana Pestana
— As a designer, cur ator and lectur er, what does speculative mean f or you? Speculative is a very interesting term that comes from observation but is more associated with gold hunting or taking very high risks in financial markets… Anton Ehrenzweig’s in The Hidden Order of Art describes something like it as essential to the dilemma inherent to the creative act of going on a journey where you don’t have all the information. For instance at Platform 10 (Design Products, Royal College of Arts), this principle encourages us to start experimenting also before we know what we’re making. To introduce more risk and conjectures into the process.
but their ambitions not suited to what they can do, this is where a speculative project can change the way people apply themselves or apply their design. So, when you set a brief within design education or within research this is in a way what you’re addressing: how far can one go, what’s worth doing. — A t RC A you teach a lot of potential speculatives, how do you set up their br ief s? There are two conditions that we try to generate. One is a brief that sets an expectation of a certain activity or behaviour, of an action, rather than a conclusion. The minute you have a conclusion it limits the way in which you might approach the problem. So if you are designing a border, say between two countries, the minute you say it’s a gated border crossing and not what conditions you need or opportunities it could enable, you have an image and you have already defined so many things. If you start by saying it’s a - insert noun here - (for example a chair) you are very likely to end up with what we already know it to be. The danger is being trapped by the very object or typology you are interested in.
— I n our las t conver sation you mentioned how the mos t i nter es ting dimension of speculation is in the pr ocess, in dr a wing f or example. Drawing in its rawest form is a process of discovery and exploration that is parallel to research, not precedent. It is a process where one speculates not just with the information in one’s head but also physically with the materials, sometimes even working without hypothesis. Can you actually do research without knowing what you’re doing? Can you speculate about scenarios or trajectories without actually having a target? Speculative work can have a dramatic impact on projects, but there is a distinct difference between a speculative approach and a planned speculative output. I’m more interested in the former rather than the latter. There are practices that speculate using their tried and tested methods. Trend or colour forecasting for example and the many formulaic in-house marketing led design teams often use methods that have been tried and tested to conceptualise, but it’s just feeding in information into a template. The result may be sold as speculative, the methodology isn’t. Although it claims to be, it’s rarely even progressive. The other side to it is having a speculative process, the result may not necessarily be very speculative but the method is and the risk raises the potential for discovery. I think this is ambitious and very capable, but also very rare. How many companies can you say are super capable and super ambitious? Very few, and it’s the same with speculatives. Because it’s a term that promises big rewards. In the entrepreneurial culture you get people that start up companies with a goal to be the leader in a certain territory. How do they go about it? Are they able to do it? And you get the same with students that come in to design education, they might be very ambitious but they might not be capable, or they might be quite capable 96
— So it ’s a matter of not objectualising… In a way, not setting the brief as a conclusion. So the important thing is the activity rather than the conclusion. For me, generating a brief that has good potential is creating a conversation about the difference between inspiration, activity and conclusion. Then it’s about the process. What is important is to understand what you want to happen as a result of the design, for example whether you want cleaner teeth, or you want to produce something with a very small piece of wood, or whether you want a toothpick. These could be the same brief, but one might result in a toothpick, one might result in a much better way of cleaning teeth and one might result in a new technique for the timber industry or in the least a toothpick plus many other ideas about how you use a particular wood or factory. It depends on how you set the ambition. When we set a brief, there is often a certain sense of openness. Ambiguity creates a situation where people are functioning without information, so more of themselves comes out because they have to fill in the gaps and create content, although there is some kind of beacon that has been set by the brief, a behavioural result, response to a subject matter or interrogation of ones ambitions. |
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