And then there are dystopias, cautionary tales warning us of what might lay ahead if we are not careful.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) are two of the twentieth century’s most powerful examples.

Much has been written about utopias and dystopias in science fiction but there is a particularly interesting strand of sci-fi critique termed critical science fiction in which dystopias are understood in relation to critical theory and the philosophy of science.

In this reading of science fiction, political and social possibilities are emphasized above all else, a role explored in depth by sci-fi theorist Darko Suvin who uses the term cognitive estrangement, a development of Bertolt Brecht’s A-effect, to describe how alternate realities can aid critique of our own world through contrast.

Extrapolation: Neoliberal Speculative Fiction

Many utopian and dystopian books borrow political systems such as feudalism, aristocracy, totalitarianism, or collectivism from history, but we find the most thought-provoking and entertaining stories extrapolate today’s free market capitalist system to an extreme, weaving the narrative around hypercommodified human relations, interactions, dreams, and aspirations.

Many of these stories originate in the 1950s. It’s as though, already in the postwar years, writers were reflecting on where the promises of consumerism and capitalism were taking us; yes, they would create more wealth and a higher standard of living for a larger number of people than ever before but what will the impact be on our social relations, morality, and ethics?

Philip K. Dick is the master of this. In his novels, everything is marketized and monetized. They are set in twisted utopias where all are free to live as they please but they are trapped within the options available through the market. Or The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, which is set in a society where the highest form of existence is to be an advertising man and crimes against consumption are possible.

This view of capitalism is not limited to 1950s and 1960s sci-fi, though, and can be found in contemporary writing.

George Saunders’s Pastoralia (2000) is set in a fictional prehistoric theme park where workers are obliged to act like cave people during working hours and try to negotiate a friendship around the rules, contractual obligations, and expectations of visitors. It is sad and funny but recognizable.

Other writers who embrace this exaggerated version of capitalism include Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), most of Douglas Coupland’s writings, Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story, 2010), Julian Barnes (England England, 1998), and Will Ferguson (Happiness, 2003).

They expose at a human scale the limitations and failures of a free-market capitalist utopia, how, even if we achieve it, it is humanely reduced. Although not a strong novel by any means, Ben Elton’s Blind Faith (2007) picks up current trends for dumbing culture down, extrapolating into a near future when inclusiveness, political correctness, public shaming, vulgarity, and conformism are the norm, a world where tabloid values and commercial TV formats shape everyday behavior and interactions.

It can be found in film, too: Idiocracy (2006) and WALL-E (2008) are both set in worlds suffering from social decay and cultural dumbing down. The most recent example is Black Mirror (2012), a satirical miniseries for Channel Four television in the United Kingdom. It fast-forwards technologies being developed today by technology companies to the point at which the dreams behind each technology turn into nightmares with extremely unpleasant human consequences.

But what does this mean for design? On a visual level, in cinema, a style has developed that is riddled with visual clichés—ubiquitous adverts, corporate logos on every surface, floating interfaces, dense information displays, brands, microfinancial transactions, and so on.

Corporate parody and pastiche have become the norm, and although Black Mirror has moved well beyond this, it is the exception. Maybe this is one of the limitations of cinema; it can deliver a very powerful story and immersive experience but requires a degree of passivity in the viewer reinforced by easily recognized and understood visual cues, something we will return to in chapter 6. Literature makes us work so much harder because readers need to construct everything about the fictional world in their imagination.

As designers, maybe we are somewhere in between; we provide some visual clues but the viewer still has to imagine the world the designs belong to and its politics, social relations, and ideology.

Ideas as Stories

In these examples, it is the backdrop that interests us, not the narrative; the values of the society the story takes place in rather than the plot and characters.

For us, ideas are everything but can ideas ever be the story?

In the introduction to Red Plenty (2010) Francis Spufford writes, “This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved.

The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindered by others.” Red Plenty explores what would have happened if Soviet communism had succeeded and how a planned economy might have worked.

It is a piece of speculative economics exploring an alternative economic model to our own, a planned economy where everything is centrally controlled, and it unapologetically focuses on ideas.

This approach is similar to design writing experiments such as The World, Who Wants it? by architect Ben Nicholson and The Post-spectacular Economy by design critic Justin McGuirk. Both are stories of ideas exploring the consequences for design of major global, political, and economic changes—Nicholson’s in a dramatic and satirical way and McGuirk through a more measured approach beginning with real events that morph before our eyes into a not so far-fetched near future. But these are still literary and although both contain many imaginative proposals on a systemic level, they do not explore how these shifts would manifest themselves in the detail of everyday life. We are interested in working the other way around—starting with designs that the viewer can use to imagine the kind of society that would have produced them, its values, beliefs, and ideologies.

In After Man—A Zoology of the Future (1981) Dougal Dixon explores a world without people focusing exclusively on biology, meteorology, and environmental sciences. It is an excellent if slightly didactic example of a speculative world based on fact and well-understood evolutionary mechanisms and processes expressed through concrete designs, in this case, animals.

Fifty-million years into the future, the world is divided into six regions: tundra and the polar, coniferous forests, temperate woodlands and grasslands, tropical forests, tropical grasslands, and deserts. Dixon goes into impressive detail about the climate, distribution, and extent of different vegetation and fauna as he sketches out a posthuman landscape on which new kinds of speculative life forms evolve. Each aspect of the new animal kingdom is traced back to specific characteristics that encourage and support the development of new animal types in a human-free world. Each animal relates to ones we are familiar with, but because of an absence of humans, evolve in slightly different ways. A flightless bat whose wings have evolved into legs still uses echolocation to find its prey but now, because of an increase in size and power, it stuns its victims. The book is a wonderful example of imaginative speculation grounded in systemic thinking using little more than pen-and-ink illustrations. It could so easily have been a facile fantasy thrilling us with the weirdness of each individual creature, but by tempering his speculations, Dixon guides us toward the system itself and the interconnectedness of climate, plant, and animal.

As well as highly regarded works of literature, Margaret Atwood’s novels are stories of ideas. Oryx and Crake sets out a postapocalyptic world populated by transgenic animals and beings developed by and for a society comfortable with the commercial exploitation of life: pigoons bred to grow spare human organs, for instance. Oryx and Crake is very close to how a speculative design project might be constructed. All her inventions are based on actual research that she then extrapolates into imaginary but not too far-fetched commercial products. The world she creates serves as a cautionary tale based on the fusion of biotechnology and a free-market system driven by human desire and novelty, where only human needs count. Unlike many sci-fi writers, Atwood is far more interested in the social, cultural, and ethical implications of science and technology than the technology itself. She resists the label of sci-fi preferring to describe her work as speculative literature. For us, she is the gold standard for speculative work—based on real science; focused on social, cultural, ethical, and political implications; interested in using stories to aid reflection; yet without sacrificing the quality of storytelling or literary aspects of her work. Similar to Dixon’s After Man, the book is full of imaginative and strange designs but based on biotechnology. Each design highlights issues as well as entertaining and moving the story along.

Whereas Oryx and Crake creates plausibility through an extrapolation of current scientific research, one of our favorite books, Will Self’s The Book of Dave uses a far more idiosyncratic mechanism for establishing a link with today’s world. It is the story of a future society built around a book written hundreds of years earlier by an alcoholic, bigoted, and crazed London taxi driver going through a messy divorce. Buried in his ex-wife’s back garden in Hampstead, he hopes his estranged son will discover the book one day. He doesn’t, and it is dug up hundreds of years later after a great flood has wiped out civilization as we know it. Basing the logic underlying a future community’s social relations on a dysfunctional taxi driver’s prejudices shows how random our customs can be and how brutality and social injustice can be shaped by strange, fictional narratives. That these lead to so much sadness and misery is tragic, and this book captures the ridiculousness of political and religious dogma. Besides the motos, a kind of genetically modified animal that seems to be a cross between a cow and a pig that speaks in a disturbing childlike manner, most of the inventions are customs, protocols, and even language. Children spend part of each week living with each parent on opposite sides of the street, young women are called au pairs, days are divided into tariffs, souls are fares, priests are drivers, and so on. The Book of Dave is a dense, inventive, highly original, complex, and layered portrayal of a fictional world. But is it possible to apply this to design? We think it is. Unlike Oryx and Crake, it is not Self’s inventions that inspire but his method and how rich and thought-provoking fictional worlds can be developed from idiosyncratic starting points.

China Miéville’s The City and the City is based on poetic and contemporary ideas about artificial borders. Two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma coexist in one geographical zone, in one city. A crime is committed that links the two cities so the protagonist, inspector Tyador Borlú, must work across borders to solve it, something that’s usually avoided at all costs because citizens of each city no longer see or acknowledge each other even while using the same streets and sometimes the same buildings

To see the other city or one of its inhabitants is a “breach,” the most serious of all crimes imaginable. It is a wonderful setting that makes not only for a fascinating detective story but also prompts all sorts of ideas about nationality, statehood, identity, and ideological conditioning to surface in the reader’s imagination. As Geoff Manaugh points out in an interview with the author, it is essentially poli-sci fiction. Everything in this book is familiar; it is the reconceptualization of a simple and familiar technical idea, the border, that makes it relevant to design, again, more for its method than its content.

As literary fictional worlds are built from words there are some rather special possibilities that can be explored by pushing language’s relationship to logic to the limit, a bit like the literary equivalent of an Escher drawing. A recent example of this is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010) by Charles Yu. Here, fictional worlds provide opportunities to play with the very idea of fiction itself. Yu’s world is a fusion of game design, digital media, VFX, and augmented reality. Set in Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, the protagonist Yu is a time travel technician living in TM-31, his time machine. His job is to rescue and prevent people from falling victim to various time travel paradoxes. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe feels like conceptual science fiction: the story unfolds through constant interactions, collisions, and fusions among real reality, imagined reality, simulated reality, remembered reality, and fictional reality.

Can design embrace this level of invention or are we limited to more concrete ways of making fictional worlds? One strength for design is that its medium exists in the here and now. The materiality of design proposals, if expressed through physical props, brings the story closer to our own world away from the worlds of fictional characters. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe makes us wonder about speculative design’s complex relationship to reality and the need to celebrate and enjoy its unreality.