What do I mean by ‘tangible imaginaries’?
In a recent keynote I gave with Jeff Watson for the Swiss Design Network, we introduced the term ‘tangible imaginaries’ as a kind of meta-category or umbrella concept to speak across a variety of speculative, fictional, and critical practices in design and related fields.
These include, but are not limited to: design fiction, speculative design (as well as its critics), science fiction prototyping, critical making, futures scenario planning, world building, situation design, speculative ritual design (my own pet topic), etc. etc. Taken as a whole, these approaches represent what some (like Derek Hales) have called a speculative turn. I’m not sure whether we know whether that’s the right term yet, but regardless, there is a shift afoot, and its emergence in such a wide range of disciplines reflects the need for conceptual promiscuity rather than balkanization.
Given this context, rather than add a new approach to this collection, I’m interested in trying to develop a meta-conversation that takes into account both distinctions as well as areas of commonality across these various conceptual and methodological boundaries. So my goal with ‘tangible imaginaries’ is not to carve out conceptual territory, but rather to be broadly inclusive in identifying productive resonance across existing categories.
For me, all of these approaches (above) share a kind of conceptual in-between-ness that connects an imagination space of a lived world (or a kernel of a world-that-could-be) with some kind of material or embodied reality. In other words, they are all grappling with an inter-play between the tangible on the one hand vs. the imaginary (or what Chiara Bottici calls the imaginal) on the other. Tangible imaginaries also invoke the sociological work that the concept of ‘imaginary‘ performs—pointing to the relationship between a technological artifact and the imagined social world that accompanies it (what Anne Balsamo has described as the technological imagination).
Tangible imaginaries can be prototypes, but they can also be performances or happenings, they can be maps, or built space; they can be social “scores” (templates for interaction), or they can be props (as in the diegetic props of design fiction). The concept is deliberately open so as to include alternative pathways of resonance between tangible and imaginary.
Given this framing, we can ask for example, what kinds of tangible imaginaries does design fiction produce? How are they similar or different than those of critical making (to take another example)? What are the areas of strength and weakness of these various approaches and what different sorts of work are they doing in their corresponding sub-fields?
Counter intuitively, despite the crowded morass of competing design terms, my sense is that our notions of what count as tangible imaginaries are actually far too sparse. And in particular, it’s important to me that we start to identify existing social practices that perform similar sorts of functions. What is the relationship, for example, between design fiction and children’s make believe? Or how are new kinds of social interactions or rituals invented by everyday people? And what can designers learn from, as well as offer, these vernacular design practices that happen “in the wild” as it were?
Who am I?
I’m a design researcher at USC interested in Design Fiction, Speculative Design, Critical Making, etc. I design things I like to call ‘speculative rituals’ and my dissertation explores the relationship between design and ritual through several projects.
In the spirit of what my mentor, Steve Anderson, describes as ‘researching in public’, I’m hoping to use this space to hash out ideas, collect examples, and explore tangents as I work on my dissertation revisions.