Speculative Everything

What it is

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming is Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby's 2013 articulation of speculative design as a discipline. Building on their earlier Hertzian Tales and Design Noir, the book moves from critical design's project of estranging the present to speculative design's project of opening the future. It is part manifesto, part survey, part teaching document — and it has structured how the field has been taught for over a decade.

Why it sits on our shelf

For us, the most useful move in Speculative Everything is the PPPP diagram — the cone of preferable, plausible, possible, and probable futures. It is now a cliché in foresight decks; we still teach it because it does one piece of conceptual work better than anything else we have found: it separates what is likely from what is desirable from what is conceivable, and it does so in a way that organisational decision-makers can read in thirty seconds. The cone is a small idea with a long working life.

We also keep returning to the book's defense of non-affirmative design — design whose purpose is not to propose a solution but to keep a question open. This is the conceptual move that distinguishes serious speculative work from "innovative thinking" exercises. Practitioners who absorb only this distinction — that the artefact is allowed to be the question — are already most of the way to doing work that matters.

Where we depart from the book: its register skews toward the art-context audience the authors were writing for, and it does relatively little to make the discipline operational in commercial or public-sector settings. That is where our work — and this site, and our methodology essay — picks up. Speculative Everything is the philosophical foundation; the working methodology is something the next generation has had to write.

Where it lands in our practice

This is the first book we recommend to any new speculative design student, and it appears on the reading list of every course we teach. It is the conceptual ground for everything we do with the Speculative Design Basics course and the Masterclass, and it informs how we explain the discipline to commissioning clients. It also sits behind the what the discipline is portion of our comparison essay.

What to read if this resonates

• •Hertzian Tales (Dunne, 1999) — the foundational critical-design text, written before the speculative move.
• •Design Noir (Dunne & Raby, 2001) — applies the critical-design method to a specific design space.
• •What is Speculative Design? — our own working definition.
• •The Speculative Design Methodology: A Practitioner's Workflow — where we take the discipline operationally.