Daisy I began to look at better as a form of social imaginary. It’s really powerful
and all of this dismantling of “better” is not to say that it doesn’t exist. I can think the world is terrible, and still believe it could be otherwise, which comes back to humans as hopeful animals – crucially, we are able to imagine that things can be otherwise. But social imaginaries are interesting because a lot of our society functions around the idea of social fictions – the nation, the idea of money and so on. The social imaginary is a useful way to talk about how we buy into a fiction and these things are not just about futures – they can be about histories too. So “Make America Great Again” or “Take Back Control” are really nice examples of how powerful social imaginaries of golden ages are. Whether America was greater before or not doesn’t matter – the whole thing is a fiction that people buy into. Oli How do you employ that in your work because to an extent you’re also in the business of putting forward imaginaries and ideas of better? Daisy Within this language of imaginaries, I’ve begun to propose something called the “critical imaginary”, which is a way of reconciling some of my problems with speculative design. For me, “speculative design” is not quite the right way of looking at things because it feels too much that it’s looking at various futures. I’m much more interested in the present and how we use these projects to effect change in the present. Rather than utopias or dystopias, the critical imaginary focuses on the idea of heterotopias from [Michel] Foucault – spaces that are different, not better. These heterotopias are “other” places, and they are spaces to reflect back on those that we currently occupy. Foucault wrote lists of spaces that could be considered heterotopias: cemeteries, cruise ships, Persian rugs, mirrors, brothels. It’s a really weird list, but they all have this common idea of being a space where you can reflect back on where you are. I thought that was a nice way of talking about these kinds of projects that create other worlds. They’re not propositions for better worlds – they’re spaces to come back here from. Oli I’m curious as to how you maintain that attitude, or encourage that interpretation. Whenever people see a possible world or different space, the temptation seems to be to read it as a utopia or a dystopia. Daisy I’m enamoured with [Jorge Luis] Borges and his story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. It’s became a really useful reference for me in that it offers the idea of multiple possible worlds in parallel. The story is of a garden that exists in time rather than space, and in which you can get to the same place from different locations. It’s an interesting way of thinking about contingency and it that has influenced my project The Wilding of Mars project. I was asked by the Design Museum to come up with something for its Moving to Mars exhibition and I really, really wanted to challenge the colonial narrative of the Mars story as it stands. Why would we want to go to Mars? Everyone would have a terrible time because we haven’t evolved to live there. We already have a really nice planet, and the rhetoric that we can trash the Earth and go somewhere else is dangerous. There is no backup to Earth, and we’re not going to suddenly become better people and behave differently when we leave Earth. Instead, I proposed to seed a wilderness on Mars – the entire premise being to send Earth life to Mars, just not humans. We would allow life to create a wilderness such that the planet becomes a repository for the mechanism of life. Maybe people will think I’m
A Mobile Bioremediation Unit from
Designing for the Sixth Extinction, designed to neutralise high soil acid levels caused by pollution.
“For me, ‘speculative design’ feels too much that it’s looking into various futures. I’m much more interested in the present.”