Imaginary ethics: The morality of fictional aesthetics in speculative design
Li Zhang · The Design Journal · 2022
To effectively examine the underlying premises of emerging technology has become a major challenge to today’s design ethics. An adequate and prefigurative response to these situations requires a shift towards a fictional aesthetics that calls for co-imagination. Speculative design that sharing a similar ethical mechanism with Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic politics is worthy of attention since the affinity between the literature and emerging designs is becoming manifest. Speculative design embodies its ethical advantage by asking ‘what-if’ questions and providing no answer to keep its prerequisite of equality of intelligence. It devises fictional props and unreal scenarios to distribute the sensible to make audiences notice the possible latent negative social consequences of future technologies. The absurdity in speculative design is what Rancière termed ‘dissensus’, which is the result of fictional aesthetics that aims to inspire reflection and debate on the current state of reality and open the possibility for preferable transformation.