Presenting the Videos of Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment Conference

Today, I am happy to share with you the videos capturing our Oct. 21 event, Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment, hosted by the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, in partnership with our colleagues in UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Producers Program. The event was organized by Denise Mann, Henry Jenkins, and Stacy Smith and sponsored by JK Foundation, Fusion/Univision, George Foster Peabody Foundation, and the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. The day was incredibly rich, full, and generative, so we are hoping that the discussions captured here can provide resources for others who are exploring issues of diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry. Final conversation with Melissa Rosenberg, Series Creator/Showrunner, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, was not recorded at the request of the speaker, but everything else is here. WELCOME Ernest J. Wilson III, Dean, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism Denise Mann, Head of the Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California

STATE OF THE FIELD

Stacy L. Smith, Director, Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, Associate Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

In February 2016, the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at USC Annenberg released the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity (CARD). The CARD report examined films, television and digital offerings of 10 major media companies from 2014-2015. Looking across gender, race/ethnicity and LGBT status, the study provides a look at what its author, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, calls an “epidemic of invisibility” in media. Dr. Smith will present findings from the CARD report and her most recent studies to give attendees a glimpse of the current state of entertainment media and the progress still needed.

PANEL 1: WHY DOES INCLUSION MATTER?

Moderator: Robeson Taj Frazier, Director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA); Associate Professor, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

After hearing about the dismal representation of marginalized groups in entertainment, one question remains: What can be done? As the conversation on diversity and inclusion continues to escalate, several voices stand out from the crowd with solutions, strategies and attempts to address disparities. This session brings together industry members and experts to discuss four essential topics. First, the panel will address why inclusive entertainment matters. Second, individuals will discuss the underlying causes at the heart of why under- or skewed-representation persists. Third, the group will overview what efforts are underway in Hollywood to effect change. Fourth, panelists will cover the challenges that remain and the work still needed to increase representation on screen and behind the camera.

PANELISTS:

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Head of Equity and Inclusion, Pearl Street Productions Bertila Damas, Actor and National Chair of the Ethnic Employment Opportunities Committee, SAG-AFTRA Melissa Goodman, Director of the LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project, ACLU of Southern California Danny Woodburn, Actor, Vice Chair SAG AFTRA Performers with Disability Committee, Member International Council on Disability, Ruderman Family Foundation

PANEL 2: WHAT ALTERNATIVES DOES SOCIAL MEDIA OFFER?

Moderator: Denise Mann, Co-director, Transforming Hollywood; Professor and Head of the Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

This panel explores social media as a powerful tool for artists, activists and influencers to express their voices of diversity and dissent outside the Hollywood mainstream. Social influencers are a new breed of online creator whose ability to thrive in the platform economy depends on their facility with social media connectivity to amass a dedicated following of online users. Fans who become invested in a favorite artist or musician can help spread their messages of change across an exponentially wider circle of social media communities. While guaranteed a paycheck via “work-for-hire” contracts, Hollywood talent lack essential power and agency because they don’t control the copyright for their artistic work. In contrast, actor-creator-entrepreneurs such as Freddie Wong and Issa Rae are running mini-studios of their own making and retaining part or full ownership of their creations; at the same time, they must use a variety of social media tools to keep their voices heard above the din of clickbait and app fatigue. This new breed of online creator also needs powerful advocates: TV showrunners who understand how to navigate the Hollywood system; talent managers who know how to connect creators with alternative voices to their fans; and tech experts who can tweak algorithms so that streaming content aggregators serve artists as well as platform founders. Welcome to the platform economy.

PANELISTS:

Troy Carter, Founder, Atom Factory; Global Head, Creative Services, Spotify Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor, Arizona State University; author Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America Prentice Penny, Executive Producer/Showrunner, HBO’s Insecure (based on Issa Rae’s web series, The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl) Freddie Wong, Director, Co-Founder and CEO, RocketJump; online video pioneer and VFX artist

PANEL 3: HOW DO WE CHANGE THE SCRIPT?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California

Within the entertainment industry, genre conventions help to shape what stories get told and how productions get promoted and marketed. Many of today’s creators find themselves pushing against taken-for-granted assumptions and long-standing formulas, and as a consequence, often fall back on old tropes and stereotypes. Both realist and fantastical genres offer opportunities for “changing the script” but they also bring historical baggage — old ideas about race, gender, sexuality and disability. The news media like to focus on the white male backlash in fandom but many active fans are embracing these changes and, indeed, modeling through their creative responses what more diverse genre entertainment might look like. Activists are asking critical questions about the ways even more diverse and inclusive productions fall short of our hopes. So, how do we change the script? How do we embrace new stories? How do we tell the old stories differently? And what role can the fantastical or speculative genres perform in imagining alternatives to current racial realities?

PANELISTS:

Grace L. Dillon, Professor, Indigenous Nations Studies Program, Portland State University; Editor, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Writer/Producer, Lost, The Middle Man, The 100, Xena: Warrior Princess Nakul Dev Mahajan, Dancer/Choreographer, So You Think You Can Dance Dodai Stewart, Executive Editor and Director of Culture Coverage, Fusion Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Young Adult Writer; Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Phil Yu, Founder/Editor: Angry Asian Man

A gliche cut off the very beginning of this program, but the core is here.

PANEL 4: HOW DO WE MOVE FROM STEREOTYPES TO MORE COMPLEX CHARACTERS?

Moderator: Maureen Ryan, Chief Television Critic, Variety; Juror, Peabody Awards

The challenge of creating more diverse representations often centers on the construction of characters. It is not enough to put diverse faces in front of the camera: We need to depict those characters with nuance and complexity, in ways that audiences will recognize from their own lives, in ways that inspire their imaginations. Where does the responsibility rest for generating compelling characters in contemporary popular entertainment? What roles do producers, writers and actors play in defining who these people are, what they desire, how they react, what goals they pursue and what relationships they form? And how should we respond when bad things happen to good characters, when subsequent production decisions undercut or marginalize characters whose presence is particularly significant for underrepresented segments of the population?

PANELISTS:

Evelyn Alsultany, Associate Professor; Director of Arab and Muslim American Studies Program, University of Michigan; author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 Desmin Borges, Actor, You’re the Worst Effie Brown, Producer, Dear White People Kathy Le Backes, Vice President of Research and Development, Wise Entertainment Melissa Silverstein, Founder and Publisher, Women and Hollywood Jeff Yang, VP of Cultural Strategy, Sparks & Honey

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 6)

How important is it that we share what emerges from our imagination with others -- that we think of imagining as a collective rather than personal/individual process?  

This is such a powerful and important question - one worth devoting much attention to, as you have!

I don’t think we can ignore that it starts with the personal/individual process – this question of the collective imagination, I mean. As individuals, as children, we learn about the world through our imagination. Playing with things, imagining what they can do and then feeling the pushback to learn about the world. As we grow, we use the same mental capacity to create the stories through which we participate in social life and then, ultimately civic life. We assimilate events and build stories that construct our individual identities inside of a larger group. So all the tools and capacities and tricks of the imagination that we employ as individuals are in preparation for both social/civic life and a larger kind of civic imagination. If we aren’t using our imagination fully to somehow close gaps between novel things and events and what we know, the stories we hold and the identities that they sustain, then we atrophy as authentic individuals – we become part of a pack. And if we are not using our imaginations fully to imagine alternate stories, to experiment with those stories, then we also atrophy. We succumb to inertia in a world that is far from inert. Resilience requires being able to imagine and then act on alternate pathways.

Imagining as a collective scales off of the personal/individual process. We know that as a child grows, they begin to participate in a social group of peers through play where the imagination gets shared through language – beginning language and simple stories. As they interact with family, school and then ultimately increasingly larger social groups, the friction between stories of their own – the stories of their embryonic identity - with and without peers - and those of the larger body require some kind of resolution. This resolution is the beginning of participating in a social group and then civic life - public life with a sense of responsibility to the group. The moment one stops using their imagination for that resolution – accepting unaltered the stories and rules of the social context they are entering – is the moment when one loses the faculties needed for a civic imagination as a collective imagining.

In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about the personal/individual process of imagining as an intra-psychological process that occurs in a short amount of time – from nano-seconds to seconds. The collective imagination is a shared cognitive/psychological/emotional process that is mediated through language or images and over some amount of time.

So when I think about the collective imagination, I think if it in two ways: as a sustaining imagination and as an evocative – propositional - imagination. The sustaining imagination is contained in the stories of a social or civic group – those stories that provide the shared identity and frames through which a group interacts with the world. ‘Images’ of how a group sees itself, the historical events from which it derives this perspective, and even what constitutes viable futures. Just as a child resolves novelty through the imagination, the civic body does as well. This is why ‘history’ is always an interpretation of facts. Biases of a group are a function of this. The fact that a group of people might actually see something – believe they see something – that does not intersect with the actual event, means that they are all working off of similar banked mental images – the stories of collective self. This is why contested geopolitical boundaries are so contested and so emotionally charged. The stories of events rarely overlap. This is also how we have things like the Salem witch trials and mass hysteria of all sorts.

But in addition to a civic imagination that sustains a civic body, there is the civic imagination deployed to either participate in civic life for the betterment of the whole and the potential for a civic imagination that works to evolve the civic – to shape the civic body anew.

If the collective imagination relies on a current of language and images, today, with all the new media we have, and with the way in which it can spread quickly over vast distances, clearly there is a new capacity for engaging people in collective imagining: for finding and building social community, for sustaining stories, for presenting the stories of others in order to hold up a mirror to a situation, cultivating understanding and empathy, and for engaging others in imagining possibilities in order to create authentic and impactful action at many scales from the personal to political. The pervasiveness of media and the ease with which individuals can participate as both creators and consumers has created hyper-performance around stories and images that are the currency of any communal imagination.

You have made great use of J.K. Rowlings quote “We do not need magic to transform the world. We carry all the power we need inside of us already. We have the power to imagine better.” Again that seems to imply the individual BUT when it is part of the Harry Potter fan base – a collective group that takes seriously that challenge and call to action – the imagination transforms into real civic engagement – engagement with a sense of responsibility to make the world better – and real civic action. This is pretty spectacular. Your new civic imagination atlas project is a testimony to the scale of this endeavor of using collective imagination for social change. And again, whether it is change to be catalyzed by empathy or by actual projects – a kind of activism of the imagination.

Another thing about media today is how engaging it is because it surrounds us with multiple inputs that challenge the boundary between the real and virtual. To be able to not only hear about something, but to see it, to be in it, virtually, and then to even participate in the story through media intentionally designed for participation (games, args, world building, fan fiction), has heightened the potential for identifying with people, situations and events as stories. The potential in this is that one slips beyond understanding into empathy. This is fascinating. John Dewey spoke of the Moral Imagination as a capacity to imagine oneself in the shoes of another in order to act better. But he also spoke of rehearsing better action. So imagining and then rehearsing, with the intention of this spilling over into real life. The ability to use media today to, not only rehearse, but to be in the situation with all of its texture is an opportunity to super-charge Dewey’s concept. I, myself, am fascinated with empathy. Empathy is a state that does not go away. Sympathy does. Too often the two are confused and little sustained action comes from sympathy.

It may seem like I am digressing but for me, empathy is engagement that transports one into a different place. Beyond understanding as a cognitive intellectual process, it compels you to act as if it were you. Collective imagining that can attain this and then open up possibilities for alternate futures – possibilities either not imagined or not seen as viable before - and then possible action - the how to get there – this is very powerful for shaping desired, not default, futures.

As I talk about this I am reminded that one must also understand how all of this can be used for bad as well as good. The capacity is agnostic. Collective imagining (ISIS’ new caliphate) can be as powerfully bad as it can be good. Understanding how it works is necessary for counteracting as well as acting.

So, yes, imagining as a collective and imagining at scale. The potential is enormous. Which makes me wonder . . .

In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about how the imagination engages in an entire spectrum of cognitive activity from perception, through reasoning, speculation, experimentation, and free play. This is a spectrum, not different categories, and different locations on the spectrum correspond to different degrees (proportions) of using the imagination for sense-making and sense-breaking.

So if you permit me to riff off this relative to the collective. Although I am not quite clear how yet, I think there is something super interesting in thinking about how the spectrum works on a collective, even civic, level both operationally and cognitively . . . Certainly networks are forging an entirely different set of scaled public spaces of imagination. I think it could be productive to unpack how the civic imagination (let’s stay with that phrase) operates and could operate all along a similar spectrum. We’ve talked about its value for creating understanding (at least) and empathy (at best), for speculating on possibilities around civic action and then carrying them out (that’s the pragmatic part – instrumentalizing the products of the imagination), and for building/widening communities around this social action . . . We know how the imagination functions collectively to perceive/interpret events that come along (often emotionally) but is it used for ‘reasoning’? And on the far side of the spectrum, towards experimenting and playing (without specific goals in mind), how to think about that . . . at scale . . . could we engage a civic collective at scale in imagining a different future? For instance, could we get a nation to imagine an alternate ‘american dream’ in a way that scaffolds ownership and commitment and leads to political action and redesign.

Benedict Anderson used the phrase Imagined Community in 1983 to define nation as a socially constructed community imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group despite the very real differences, inequalities and exploitations that exist. It is an imagined political community that shares, what he calls, a deep horizontal comradeship. As testimony to this he talks about the willingness of millions of people over the last two centuries ‘to die for such limited imaginings.’ Writing this today on 9/11 2016, it is pretty clear that that statement has become much more true in certain contexts and much less true in others. What would be interesting is to pragmatically construct a process to catalyze the civic imagination of us at the scale of all of us in order to, not only find coherence of nation, but to imagine a nation that holds all of our diversities[1] in a productive culture[2] of cacophonies.

So yes, to answer your question, sharing what emerges from our imaginations with others is invaluable. Finding pragmatic ways to instrumentalize what emerges is even more critical. And imagining collectively for civic purpose (on the good side) and then finding pragmatic ways to set that imagination on the ground running towards a better future at any scale is even more valuable. I want to emphasize the ‘at any scale’ part because small actions, smartly deployed, can have disproportionate impact. BUT, there is a caution in this. And that is that ‘smart’ is critical. Intention and capacity to imagine better is not enough. In a complex world that is constantly changing and hyper-connected, where contingencies override absolute conditions, unintended consequences or even just unforeseen consequences can override intentions. Knowing how to navigate this world is critical for civic action. This is what Design Unbound is about - a kind of manual for how-to-think-about and tools-to-do. Pragmatic Imagination is what we call both parent and child to DesUnbound because without the imagination, it is hard to get beyond incremental change and default futures. But also, it, as a specifically human faculty, is the way we evolve as individuals, as societies and cultures, and as a globally distributed species. At all scales, imagination is, as one of Frank Underwood’s writers, Beau Willimon, says, its own form of courage. In context of the show, he did not mean imagination itself, but the willingness to follow where it leads and act on it. Of course, in his case, we can’t ignore that there was/is some degree of evil involved.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).

[1] Diversities is pluralized to indicate many kinds of diversity from physical to cultural to socio-economic to educational to dispositional and so on – a whole host of diversities.

[2] by culture I mean like the culture in a petri dish – the growing of organisms in or on a medium.

Mapping the Pragmatic Imagination: An Interview with Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (Part 5)

You cite designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Ruby as saying, “The purpose of speculation is to unsettle the present rather than to predict the future.” Does this imply that science fiction and other speculative genres might have a particularly powerful role to play in fostering the Pragmatic Imagination? What do you see as the relationship between speculative fiction and speculative design?  

Yes, absolutely, and in two ways. Speculative genres serve as provocation, whether as a challenge directed at society through speculation as critique, or as an evocative object/text/construct, that sets the imagination in motion in the reader - orchestrating their participation in the speculation. But speculative genres can also serve as methodologies, meaning that one can engage in the making of speculative fiction – writing scenarios of one’s own as part of a larger process of speculation around a topic or problem. In Pragmatic Imagination, we have a chapter on this issue of setting the imagination in motion – tricking it to appear when one has something they need it for.

Speculative genres are powerful because they are much bigger than merely predictive. When done well, they honor the same muses of prediction – they understand the need to find trends in the present that will impact the future - but they don’t stop there because they do not assume that the future is pre-written, nor are they uncritical of trends and their possible trajectories. Dunne and Raby’s statement hit a chord with me because of the opportunity that is inherent in shifting from prediction to speculation. Prediction implies that the future is something playing out and that predicting it in advance puts us in a better position when we get there. Unsettling the present is about actively accepting the responsibility that we are all constructing our future with the decisions we make and the things we do. Trends then are merely trajectories with a history but also with an alterable future. Both speculative fiction and speculative design work to question trends and their interactions by speculating on what might play out (for good and bad) and presenting alternatives that may be either worse or more desirable. Science fiction and speculative fiction can do both. They can play out trends the authors see emerging – alerting us to the monster in the backyard or pointing out the angel of opportunity in the driveway – but they can also break with the logic of trends, unsettling the present by speculating on futures that would demand action in the present to get there.

Speculation comes in different genres – is present in different genres. We see it as fantasy and horror, as science fiction, and even as satire or mock non-fiction. Speculative fiction and design can be extreme fantasy or it can be just one note shy of reality.

The kind of speculative fiction I have always been most drawn to is the one that is just a note shy of reality; one that opens up a gap of dissonance between what you think you know and some peripheral parallel possible reality. I remember discovering Ray Bradbury when I was very young . . . Growing up in the Midwest – not one particular place – but lots of the same kinds of places – suburban towns-not-quite-towns – where the trees never grew taller than 5 feet (seemingly – we moved a lot) and the back yards blended into one unending undifferentiated lawn. Under-stimulated intellectually and emotionally, I took to reading Ray Bradbury. I remember discovering Something Wicked This Way Comes, October Country and The Illustrated Man (preparing me for my obsession with Magical Surrealism later on). These are not what we think of when we think of science fiction – perhaps closer to an American surrealism that blends some aspects of science fiction with liminal horror and fantasy. These novels completely captivated me because they revealed an edge or crack in reality. Inside that crack was a mirror reflecting back a hyper-perspective – an uncanny space alive with possibilities, both good and bad. This instilled in me the sense of alternate spaces and stories just out of reach, simultaneously just beyond the big-sky horizon at the end of my street and embedded in the folds of too much time on my hands. I became captivated by the notion of what else might be out there, especially possibilities that might make little or no sense in the calculus of the present, although one might reverse engineer them to.

So back to your question more directly, I think the value in science fiction is that it speculates on what the future might look like if we play out certain trends in science and technology. This helps us see where we might be headed. If we don’t like it, then that certainly unsettles the present, emotionally. The Matrix is one very good example of this as is Stephenson’s work. Socially oriented science fiction tends to critique the world, show us the repercussions of our ways, and in a space that we emotionally respond to whether positively or negatively. Science fiction when it is story based tends to create an emotional look and see. But science fiction can also speculate on what one might accomplish in the future. This is where the fiction of Jules Verne or Asimov might fit in. Jules Verne’s work not only socialized the science and technology but created desire for.

Science fiction helps readers imagine alternate scenarios constructed on playing out science and technology trends or desires. There has always been a gap between those who are scientifically and technologically sophisticated, or even knowledgeable, and those who are not – usually the majority of a population. This gap is only increasing. Science fiction brings this science and technology into the realm of the social. It does so to entice and to warn, playing out fantasy and fears. The unsettlement is the emotion of being confronted with these. In a complex evolving world, there are always unintended/unforeseen consequences of things we do – the sciences and technologies we develop. But when a monster appears in the back year, most of us believe it will disappear because it wasn’t there yesterday or the day before. We believe it must be an aberration. Science fiction writers recognize these monsters – the good and bad ones – for what they are, imagine what they might become, and construct stories around them. This is valuable. But the problem with science fiction (why I am less interested in most of it) is that it doesn’t necessarily speculate on possible alternative states that may or may not be about trends. And science fiction often does all the work for the reader.

Science fiction that engages in world building goes beyond science fiction that is meant to show us something. In creating an entire world context with texture and coherence, the reader is now asked to participate in that context. In doing so, they contribute, they speculate. They write new stories and build out more of the world. This moves one from the big picture of, for example, machines dominating the world in The Matrix, to the texture of a prototyped near future – Minority Report – in which the big picture cascades through all facets of the world in which we participate. In this kind of science fiction, we run into conflicts as things bump up against each other. Driving for coherence, we seek to resolve, or wrestle with these conflicts: marketing and surveillance and bio-engineering and cars and family life . . . So beyond the message and themes, one participates and wrestles with the world one is speculating about. This is valuable.

I am much more interested in fiction that explores and tests boundaries to stimulate insights about the world around us - to challenges us to see the world less naively – and then provoke a space of possibility in which we can imagine – non-naively – the world differently – different for better, whether only incrementally better or hugely better.

World building can do this.

But this brings us also to speculative fiction. It would be fair to say that all fiction is speculative but of course what you mean, what we mean, when we refer to speculative fiction is fiction where one is speculating, usually about a world space, around some theme or idea. For me the paradigmatic example of this is the short ‘story’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by the Argentinian poet/writer/intellectual Jorge Luis Borges. Tlön is written as a narrative account of finding a piece of an encyclopedia for a supposedly real, but obviously fictional, world. In parallel to telling the story of the discovery of this encyclopedia, it cites from the encyclopedia, providing a textured sketch of the world of Tlön, which is built on a specific philosophical ideology that exists in the society in which Borges lived. He speculates on what a world based on Berksonian Idealism would look like – in all domains from language to animals to social and economic systems. He does this in order to speculate on how this idea would play out – what a world based on this concept would look like. This kind of speculative fiction is stunning in that it allows us to play with concepts or trends or anything in order to see a different possible world. This disrupts how we think and act in the present. Borges did not set Tlön n the future. Instead it was an alternate now (actually, an alternate then – it was first published in 1940) that was intended to disrupt and influence – unsettle – the now (then).

Speculative fiction can be in the realm of futurism, but it does not have to be. This is where it parts company with science fiction. I am actually much more interested in speculative fiction that is used to interrogate the present, unsettling it so that we might actually act differently (so back to the quote from Dunne and Raby).

Another one of my favorite books, which is speculative in nature, is The City & the City by China Miéville. Alex McDowell introduced me to this when we were doing the RiLao world building studio. The City & the City interrogates the notion of two cities that exist overlaid, or interleaved. One city is wealthy and modern, while the other is struggling and not modern. There are forces that believe the two cities were one city and forces that are responsible for policing the difference. Citizens of each city are required to ‘unsee’ the other city, even if a car from the other city is hurtling towards them – stepping out of the way without ‘seeing’ the car. To travel between cities requires going through customs and immigration even if the person you want to meet with lives in the building next door to you. Miéville denies different interpretations that frame the book as only a critique of given conditions in our cities today. I suspect it is because he is more interested in the speculation than the critique - interrogating what this condition means for one’s love life, business, etc. and then speculating on how to get around it. The novel is a who-done-it set in a world of ‘what-if’. As we participate in the who-done-it aspect, we begin to engage with the premise and try to see a few steps ahead. Speculative fiction allows us to see a story or a world based upon a ‘what if’. And usually, it engages us to participate in speculating on that what if. But it stops there. It might emotionally and intellectually motivate us to action but it does not really ask us to, nor does it provide a framework for action.

Speculative design on the other hand is a call to action, even if only for the designers. Design that is speculative, even if existing on a very theoretical plane, is always a call to action because design by nature goes from ‘what-if’ (the speculative question) to designing ‘as if’ if were real (fiction and world building does this as well) but because design is engaged within a practice that is geared towards ultimately producing things in the real world, it puts speculation and imagination around speculation to purpose. Even when not realized, it is there ready to be released into the real world because speculative design is meant to circulate. It “depends upon dissemination and engagement with a public or expert audience” – those who are in a position to do things in the real world.

Speculative design can be about small things (Superflux – a camera to photograph 5 dimensions) or it can play a social and possibly political role, “combining the poetic, critical and progressive by applying excessively imaginative thinking to seriously large scale issues,” quoting Dunne and Raby again. Dunne and Raby have a project called “The United Micro-Kingdoms”, which they talk about in their book Speculative Everything. They refer to it as ‘big design’ because it is societal systems level design. But it actually does both. It speculates at the ‘big’ systems level and then designs artifacts that both manifest and interrogate the ‘big.’ The project speculates on four different possible futures based upon a set of four different political ‘what-if’ scenarios that are derived from crossing degrees of personal freedom with degrees of economic freedom. They used a scenario planning framework where two axis cross representing two different current trends one wants to focus on, creating four quadrants that represent four possible scenarios. Unlike traditional scenario planning though, the axes are not associated with real world trends but (conflicting) political positions, and the scenarios are not anticipated scenarios but imagined states. Instead of “it will play out this way”, they ask “what if we could imagine it this way.” The project creates four concurrent micro-Britains, each of which is based upon an alternate ‘what if’ scenario. Not stopping there, they then do a partial world build of those scenarios and then focus on the automobile and its infrastructure as a physical artifact and system that manifests many aspects of that world. In the end, the results play out, critique, and interrogate current positions and trends. But they do so by speculating on alternate courses of history based upon other values and intersecting ideologies.

While being a type of research, it is more. It opens up a public imagination (speculative design is meant to be disseminated – the United Micro-Kingdoms project was extensively exhibited and published) to possible future realities. Speculative design, even in its extreme form, is not fiction. It is meant as research into possibilities. And like all good research, the most successful speculative design can be rigorously interrogated and assessed.

This is part of the pragmatic dna: to not imagine gratuitously or for personal pleasure only, but also, for public influence and agency. For me, as an architect, this is when it becomes very interesting – when it leads to agency in the real world.

Speculative design is a space between reality and the impossible. It focuses on how to think about reality in a sophisticated, complex, world-space way. To use the imagination both freely and synthetically - for sense-breaking and sense-making to radicalize reality. In Pragmatic Imagination, we talk about setting the imagination in motion and then instrumentalizing the products of the imagination for action in the world. Speculative design offers a framework for setting oneself in motion within the context of a big question or problem that draws on the pragmatic imagination. It also suggests a practice of design speculation that instrumentalizes the products of the speculation through public dissemination. But one need not stop there.

Ann Pendleton‐Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing whose work explores the interchange between architecture, landscape, culture, science, and technology within complex contexts. She is currently Full Professor and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, distinguished Visiting Professor out of the President’s Office at Georgetown University, and periodically co-teaches world building studios at USC’s School of Cinema.

ApJ’s projects range in scale and scope from things to systems of action. Notable projects demonstrating this range are: a house for the astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife; award winning prototypical bioclimatic houses – one for Tenerife; various winning or placing competition entries including a New Congress Hall in Valparaiso, Chile, and an urban design project for the Miguelete River basin sponsored by the Municipality of Montevideo. Much of her recent work focuses on empowerment and economic development through various projects including the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh and an eight-village ecosystem conceived around rural craft tourism in Guizhou province in China. Currently she is working on a new Jesuit University for Eastern Africa, including its pedagogical model, the future re-imagining of the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and a house in an environmentally sensitive part of the Pocono Mountains. ApJ has five authored books and portfolios, including: The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile by MIT Press (’96); Games for Shanghai (’08) published by CA Press in Shanghai; and Design Education and Innovation Ecotones (’09).