Designed Realities Studio

You point out that in much of contemporary design discourse, there is a tension between usefulness and fiction — that fiction is seen as something negative or wasteful. Why is it important that design understands fiction and speculation as means to resist or inflect dominant social mores or intractable economic models?

To take the problem of perpetuity and legitimacy to its extreme, I engaged in a thought experiment: What if a nation was founded, and a constitution was written, to phase out human life?

What if our approach to design education is wrong? What if educating designers to work with prevailing economic, social, technological and political realities — designing for how the world is now, has become a convenient conceit?

Communo-nuclearists have a refined sensitivity to different shades of reality: possible and impossible, imagined, actual, virtual, and so on. There are many occupations related to this, falling under the general title of Reality Constructor, which includes reality designers, reality producers, new reality finders, and reality fabricators (bottom-up and top-down).