Here’s a bit of background on the authors, in the form of an interview.
James: Julian, as someone coming from literature, etc., what is your interest in the future?
I was never as interested in science fiction, or what I thought was sci-fi, as I was in other types of experimental literature - modernists like Joyce and the sort of stuff you were meant to read in university. At a certain point I had to make up for lost time, and began devouring Bradbury, Le Guin, Wells and the rest. What I did read a lot of during my studies, though, were manifestos - and all those improbable visions of the Futurists and Vorticists and Situationists still shape my thinking about futures, including what we’ll call ‘crap futures’. The Futurist Fortunato Depero, for example, who was a brilliant designer, wanted to design toys that not only stimulated children’s creativity, but also prepared them for the total and perpetual war that the Futurists were always promoting. So that was an early crap future.
But as far as literature informing my thoughts about futures - I remember feeling a mix of gratitude and relief when I heard Warren Ellis’s closing keynote (‘Some Bleak Circus’) at FutureEverything last year. Ellis spoke about the future through manifestos and ideas drawn from literature, and without resorting to a bunch of tech jargon. He looked like a storyteller, sitting in his old leather armchair and reading from a Kindle. That’s when it hit me that talking about the future wasn’t just the business of foresight consultants. But in fact there is a long history - Marshall McLuhan, for example, couldn’t go two pages in a future prophecy without mentioning Finnegans Wake.
The other way I engage with futures is through my training in critical thinking, close reading, and so on. I found I could look at the fictions propagated by the corporate world about possible futures the same way I could look at other types of storytelling. Thankfully this critical approach to futures has been gaining ground in recent years, establishing some much needed resistance to the kind of boosterism that dominates not only the corporate world but also a lot of tech research in the academic sphere. For various reasons the question of why more innovation in needed is far too seldom asked.
Julian: And you, James: as a designer - etc.! - how do you see the future?
It would be fair to say that I am approaching the time of life when men typically become grumpy. I am becoming increasingly grumpy about design and about the future.
As a young design student in the 90s I was proud to be practicing in my chosen discipline and happily set about learning how to develop new products that people might want to own. But looking back I realise that my education (and the majority of other designers’) desperately lacked any critical or philosophical foundation.
Myths taught at design school:
1. Design is good
2. Design makes people’s lives better
3. Design solves problems
Of course design can be and do all of these things but it has become so intrinsically linked to the complex systems of commerce and innovation that it has essentially been reduced to a novelty machine. Optimism is endemic meaning that it is unnatural for designers to think about the implications of their (technological) products: technology is good; products are good; and the future (through technological products) will therefore also be good!
I have recently been thinking a lot about constraints (it is normal for a designer), but going beyond the immediate and obvious such as costs, material, physical etc. to consider what are the constraints that reduce the possibilities of the future, or perpetuate certain trajectories.
Or alternatively the un-constraints of libertarian thinking - the techno-utopian dictatorships of Silicon Valley …
Speculative design is immature and evolving. Its boundaries, definitions, and purpose can therefore lack focus, states James Auger. The spectacular and provocative nature of many speculative design projects has led to them being widely disseminated across a broad range of media and contexts. This has raised the profile and appeal of the approach but at the same time allowed for a fundamental lack of discussion on the deeper motivations and meaning behind some of the projects. Complicating matters further is its close relation to other practices such as design fiction and critical design – this can lead to the assumption that its raison d'être is the same. In this paper, and drawing on his work as designer, researcher, and educator in the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art in London, Auger suggests a number of criteria through which speculative design projects might be assessed, arguing we must further our theoretical understanding of the practice before we can further the practice itself.
Real Prediction Machines is a data-driven approach to fortune-telling, a speculative design project that proposes that prediction algorithms, like Amazon's anticipatory shipping algorithm, or financial forecast algorithms, will potentially be used in domestic scenarios to predict things like future arguments or family deaths. The service provider of this thing would tune the algorithm to the data needed to make such a prediction and then the user would see on a minimal device interface whether the event is approaching, receding or imminent. A bit of a vague project, but worth adding to the algopop archive.
The project is on display at the Crafting Narrative exhibition in Ealing, London, that ends this Sunday.
Speculative design combines informed, hypothetical extrapolations of an emerging technology’s development with a deep consideration of the cultural landscape into which it might be deployed, to speculate on future products, systems and services. These speculations are then used to examine and encourage dialogue on the impact a specific technology may have on our everyday lives. The familiar and engaging nature of the designed output is intended to facilitate discourse with a broad audience: from experts in the field such as scientists, engineers and designers to the consumers and users of technological products and systems.
Defining a robot is by no means an easy task. The noun robot does not refer to one specific object; it is not based on a particular technology, activity or function and whilst certain stereotypical robot forms such as anthropomorphic pervade, other diverse and surprising configurations of technology can also be considered a robot. The definition for such a broad range of possibility is by necessity vague.
In ‘Philosophical Investigations,’ Wittgenstein approaches the subject of games: board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. He asks, ‘what is common to them all? - Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’” – but look and see whether there is anything common to all.’ He concludes that there is not something that is common to all but ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.’ (Wittgenstein, 1998. P.31) Wittgenstein ultimately characterises these similarities as family resemblances.
This is helpful in terms of generating a practical understanding of robots, indeed we can begin by listing the family traits commonly associated with things robotic but still the problem of definition persists. First, unlike ‘game,’ when used as a noun in popular culture, ‘robot’ is commonly used without a qualifier, this suggests the existence of a generic notion: the mythical or iconic image of the robot. Second, unlike a game, the robot can exist simultaneously in diverse contexts and planes of reality: as a functional engineered machine operating autonomously on a production line such as an industrial robot; as a corporate vision of the future such as a humanoid robot; as a complex construct of fiction such as an android, or as a high-street product such as a robotic vacuum cleaner. And whilst the promiscuity of the generic concept of robots often leads to these worlds blurring together, the actual artefact is very poor at migrating between them: fictional robots rarely become products.
The word robot has its etymologic roots in the play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ (R.U.R.) by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Here the contemporary dichotomy of fiction and reality were combined: artificial humans (androids) operating as inexpensive production line workers, the word robot suggesting work, cheap labour or servitude in Slavic languages. Whilst there is a long history of objects, both real and fictional that could have been labelled as robots before Čapek coined the term, this moment (1920) serves as a sensible point from which to start, as R.U.R. was one of the first major works to move the robot beyond the world of magic and illusion and into the real world of manufacture and production. At the same time it built on a history of previous fictions such as the Jewish legend of the golem, several Greek mythologies such as Pygmalion and Daedalus and Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein,’ in exploring the creation of artificial life and its potential implications.
In the years following R.U.R., fiction and reality diverged as Čapek’s vision of automation came true but the robots designed to operate on production lines emerged out of the logical progression of Fordism and as such manufacturing engineering and market demands informed their form and behaviour rather than historical notions of humanoids. This engineering approach and the relative uniformity of the industrial robot has influenced many of the recent attempts at definition, for example the Robot Institute of America (1979) suggest the following:
A re-programmable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks.
More recently (2007) The International Federation for Robotics (IFR) divide robots into two categories: Industrial and service. Their definition of an industrial robot is not dissimilar to the above. A service robot they tentatively define as follows:
A service robot is a robot which operates semi- or fully autonomously to perform services useful to the wellbeing of humans and equipment, excluding manufacturing operations.
Had the success of industrial robots diminished our fascination, or distracted us from more dramatic or sensational robots, then the above definitions would suffice, but the robot in contemporary culture has been far more informed by the drama of science fiction and the theatre of the technology fair than the reality of production lines and it is this spectacular image that continues to dominate public perception. Largely influential in this shaping of the popular robot was the Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s Electro, a giant metal, walking, talking robotic man presented at the 1939 New York World Fair. Whilst this was not the first humanoid, Electro’s importance was in starting the trend for suggesting that robots could enter the home as domestic helpers. This represented an optimistic version of Čapek’s cautionary tale and created a positive vision of the robotic future that persists to this day. Today, the robots in fiction continue to be far more advanced than their real-life counterparts, but research continues to reduce this disparity and is a major motivational force in contemporary science and engineering.
It is now time to conclude by attempting some hard definition of the robot In terms of actual definition, it is necessary to apply a rather broad set of criteria and in doing so give space for a re-thinking of the term and its materialisation. The barest generally accepted defining factors and those that I will apply in this thesis are as follows: ‘For a thing to be considered robotic it should be able to sense and interpret in some fashion its environment; compute decisions based on that sensory information; and then act on those decisions in some mechanical way.’ This statement serves to satisfy from a technical perspective but its dryness fails to reflect the mythical or emotive factor associated with robots in fiction or expectation. To the technical definition I then add: ‘The complexity or sublimity of either the sensing, computing or mechanics should elevate the status of robotic object above that normally ascribed to machines or products.’
