E1: Speculative Design with Eleonore Eisath
This is a transcript of the first episode of Cognitive Snap. Listen now on your favourite podcast app.
“Design” is one of those terms today that is used so often that nobody really knows what it means anymore. It could mean something as broad as just “creating something new” to a very specific process used to go from problem space to solution. In the industry today it means understanding the user and their needs and finding a way to solve their problems and improve their experience using the technology available.
Based on this definition, it seems like everything starts from the user, that all design is user-centric design. But design in its purest sense can be more than this. Design may be used as a tool for reflection, for discussion and exploration.
Ele: Speculative design is a really common tool to show different versions of the future.
That was my good friend, Eleonore Eisath, giving us a glimpse into what we’re going to be talking about today. Ele is from Italy, studied chemistry for a while and decided to switch when she found about industrial design. Finishing up her bachelors in Venice, she moved to New Zealand, worked in Australia for a while and eventually made her way back to Europe. She just finished her masters in Industrial Design from the technical university of Munich, where we met. As part of her master thesis, she worked on designing a biotic recycling system for plastic, by using worms that can decompose plastics!
After two years of working and studying together , I think it’s safe to say that we know each other quite well.
Bawa: You’re one of the few people — at least in my age group — who doesn’t have a smartphone. What’s that like?
Ele: I guess I have to start with the fact that I’m a little bit different. When smart phones first came out, I didn’t eally have the money to get one, so that was the main reason. After a while people started asking me, ‘so when are you getting a smartphone’ and I wasn’t feeling it. I was seeing people walking around looking at their phones, getting distracted by them. It felt so weird, unnatural to me and I didn’t really want to be like them.
And another reason is that I really like getting lost, just wandering around. And if you don’t have a smartphone, you ave the possibility to do that. When you get lost, you discover a lot of cool things. It’s so much cooler when you go somewhere and you don’t know how you got there.
Exactly this kind of spirit, the willingness to get lost and enjoy it, is what drives speculative design. You know, it’s hard to find a straight-up definition of speculative design. There’s no wikipedia article on it, for example. But trawling through the internet, here’s one that I found by designer, J. Paul Neeley, that I thought was quite comprehensive:
“A discipline looking to design future products and services as a way to understand the social, cultural and ethical implications of emerging technologies and trends.”
It’s essentially a method of moving away from the here and the now, a way to get your head up and confront the future. Here’s what I love so much about speculative design: you have to abandon the traditional notions of design and design methods to do this. In their book, Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby say that, “to find inspiration for speculating through design we need to look beyond design to the methodological playgrounds of cinema, literature, science, ethics, politics, and art”.
From MIT Press
Speaking of literature, one of my favourite science fiction books is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, an incredibly funny book that’s also a very insightful look into the future. One of my favourite passages is this first paragraph in chapter 12:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive — you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
Douglas Adams wrote this in 1979, years before even touch screen became popular, let alone gesture control. And not only does he predict gesture control, he even thinks about the potential problems with gesture control in the future. This reminds me of Frederik Pohl who said that a good story should predict not just the automobile, but also the traffic jam. This kind of insight comes from speculation about the future, when we unshackle ourselves from what we need today, and what is possible today and instead explore our hopes and fears for tomorrow.
And about 10 years before Douglas Adams published his book, in 1968, Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed a ski cabin. But this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill wooden log-house. This was a child of the space age; it looked like a flying saucer complete with elliptical windows and a hatch that opened downwards, made out of a new type of fibreglass-reinforced plastic. Modular, easy to move, easy to install. He called it the Futuro House.
In 1968, nobody needed the Futuro house. Suuronen didn’t really think about what people would want to buy in the next skiing season, because this wasn’t just a ski cabin. This was a speculation into what the world might look to in the future. A future of the internet, of automation and climate change. Less than a 100 Futuro houses were ever built, and about 60 of them remain, Suuronen’s legacy scattered around the globe.
And since 2016, one of them just happens to be in Munich, Germany.
The Futuro House next to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich
Almost two years ago, 26 of us, students of industrial design and architecture from the technical university of Munich put together an installation at the Pinakothek der Moderne, one of Europe’s biggest museums for modern art and design. It was on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Futuro house. We looked back to 50 years ago and the Futuro house inspired us to look 50 years into the future. What does the world have in store for us in 2068, and what do we have in store for it?
Futuro 50|50 at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (Photo: Lars Lubatschowski)
Ele: The briefing was for us to find scenarios for the year 2068. We had different topics — mobility, environment, society. We chose to do it on environment. So we did some research on climate change and plastic pollution. Fo the project, we thought about an island that would swim on the ocean. The ocean would have risen because of climate change. You have these river deltas where we people can’t live anymore. It’s also polluted with plastic, because the pollution gets bigger and bigger.
Our idea was that they collect all the plastic in the ocean and build islands on the plastic. Once they build the floating islands, they can put soil on them and this soil would contain microorganisms that can decompose the plastic and turn the whole thing into humus. So the people can start planting their food on the islands. You’d have a small eco-system where you turn the plastics into fresh soil again and close the circle. And this is where I first met the worms, in a paper that I read!
The worms that she’s talking are a unique species called wax worms. In 2017, a group of scientists claimed that these worms possessed the ability to somehow digest plastic.
Ele: They published this paper about the wax worms where they accidentally discovered that they ate plastic. They were carrying around some food and they had worms in there and they started eating the bag. They did some tests and squeezed the worm. They made like a worm paste on the bag and holes started to appear. So the conclusion was that there was bacteria in the gut of the worms that can decompose plastic.
Until this point, not a lot was known about these worms, but one thing is for sure: they do not have a good reputation. They get their name from their annoying habit of getting into beehives and eating the hives from the inside out, giving them the nick name “bee-killers”.
Ele: When you google them, you get a lot of websites where they tell you how to kill them. It’s all these beekeepers exchanging information about how to get rid of them.
Having discovered these worms and their ability in her first semester, Ele wanted to get back to them in her master thesis and really think about the implications of this possible technology.
Ele: When I first read about these microorganisms, I was really amazed by this topic. This actually gives me hope. This means that nature solves the problem by itself, more or less. We can still mess up, and there will be some solution some day, maybe with us or without us, one day. But nature can always heal itself somehow.
Ok, so now you know you’ve stumbled upon this thing that might potentially save the world. What do you do about it? And how did she turn this into a master thesis in design? Before she thought about the design part, she wanted to get to know her worms a little better.
Ele: So I did this experiment where I put the wax worms into containers with different kinds of plastics. They started chewing PE and PLA in just a couple of hours. They like those. But the thing is that they like eating. They’ll basically eat whatever they can eat.
But after a few days, you could tell whic materials were bad for them, and which were good. For example, they also ate PU (foam, polyurethane), but they died from it, so that wasn’t really healthy for them.
When it comes to polyethylene — the plastics that I’m addressing because it’s the most common plastic, 30% of the world’s production of plastics—they just kept eating it and they were fine, even for four or five weeks, althought they were turning into moths a little faster than usual though.
But the most interesting thing was that they didn’t only eat the plastic, but they also produce a thread, and this thread changes a lot if they eat only polyethylene.
You have to imagine that there are all these tiny worms that are in there with strips of plastic, and after a few days, all the worms are in their own little plastic bags, that they made for themselves.
Ele: And you’re like, “how the hell did that happen?”
A wax worm in a plastic cocoon
Ele: Yeah, I would check every three or four days. After only one or two weeks, I opened up the box, and there were all these tiny plastic bags with worms inside. And I went to Rudiger and said, “What the hell is this?” and he said, “I don’t know!” And he was really excited.
“Ah, we’ve discovered something that nobody’s seen before, it’s crazy!” We were freaking out, it was really cool!
And we put it under the microscope and saw that it was actually really different from the normal material. And this is where the chemists started to come into the project. To confirm that the materials are different, you have to have some kind of analysis.
This method for analysis is something called Raman spectroscopy, where you let light reflect off of these materials and compare the spectrum of reflected light with a database of previously measured materials. So they still have to conduct more tests to make sure, but…
Ele: They were clearly different materials. What was also interesting is that the computer that’s connected to the laser gives you all the similar materials straight away and it said that it’s nylon. So it basically has the same chemical properties as nylon. When you think about how you can use the thread, it goes in a really cool direction.
Bawa: That’s true. I have to say I’m a little envious. As a designer we don’t have this moment of excitement. I don’t know when I’ll come up with an icon or some design solution and then go, “oh my god! Nobody’s seen this before, this is so exciting!” And you got to live through that as a designer.
Ele: Yeah I was really excited the first time we found out. But I have to say that, it could be that they’re really decomposing plastic and this is evidence that they do that. But it could also be that they are starving, and because they’re starving, the silk is changing. So first I was like you, “I’m discovering something that no one’s seen more, it’s gonna be the coolest thing!”
Then I met this other biologist, and he was like, “Wait…maybe, you’re just starving them to death. And that’s why it’s changing. And I was like, “ah, maybe you’re right.”
The third theory is that they chew it up into small, tiny pieces, into nano-plastics. And the thread just contains these little pieces. Which would also be cool because you could use the thread, and it would be a new use for plastic material. The worst case would be the starving theory. That would be like, “I’m a monster!”
Bawa: During the course of your thesis, you spent a lot of time in the laboratory, with scientists. A lot of designers don’t do this, especially wen it’s something as important as the master thesis. What did you learn? What was that like? Are we the same?
Ele: It’s funny you ask me that. My advisor asked me the same question after he met one of the scientists — a chemist. He’s really nice, but he’s as you can imagine a chemist — his way of thinking is totally different from the way that we think. We have an explorative way of thinking, and he has this really streamlined way of thinking. And he gets really confused by you being really crazy in your thoughts. “No, but if A, then B. It can’t be C!” It’s too much for him.
So after [my advisor] met him, he was like, “how did you deal with these people?”
My answer to that is, first of all, as a designer, you always have to be open-minded and open for everything, especially for this really streamlined way of thinking. These people can see things that we can’t see. We are always in this big-picture way of thinking, but these people like the chemist, they are always in the detail and go really deep into a topic. So I think you can learn a lot from them, also when it comes to the way they think.
Bawa: In your thesis, you talk about two goals. This is a good time to bring that up. Tell me about the two goals.
Ele: So far we talked only about the worms, and I obviously get asked that about a lot, but also what that has to do with design. The two goals of the thesis were: The first one, the research goal, is what I already talked about. Developing a biotic recycling system, with worms or other kinds of organisms.
The other goal — and the more important one for the thesis — is to build a bridge between science and society. To make the thigns that happen in labs and research centres understandable for everybody and reachable for everybody. The biggest problem we have in science is that it’s too far away from people’s everyday life and what we do on a daily basis. I thought design would be a good transformation tool to bring my insights during the research and the experiments, to something that could be interesting for everybody. Design is a really good tool to make things attractive for everybody.
To make biotic recycling understandable and attractive, Ele decided to think about a possible future where this technology might become important, maybe even unavoidable.
Ele: In speculative design, you often work with scenarios so you have a clear vision of waht you want to do and what future you want to aim for. I used a method to come from current trends to future scenarios. So you can go from things that you can see in society now and make a scenario out of it and follow all the steps to that scenario.
So I made up the scenario that by 2040, we’ll run out of fossil fuels — which is quite probable due to climate change and other environmental issues. We have to be really careful with what happens with our resources, so the state decides to quit on fossil fuel.
So, basically, you have to imagine that in 2040, we’ve run out of all our fossil fuel, or we get really close to using it all up. Most states ban the use of fossil fuels, which means that you can’t produce “new” plastic, or virgin plastic, anymore. Companies will be forced to find better ways of recycling old plastic.
Ele’s speculative start-up idea: a company that recycles PE using the worms, produces fabric and sells it to other companies
Ele: So, in my speculation, I thought about a start-up that actually recycles polyethylene for big textile industry compaies. They take the PE, recycle it using the worms, produce nylon thread and they sell it to the companies.
And for this startup — which she decided to call Beworm— she thought about how to communicate the technology and the service to its customers. So the website is the most important touch-point.
I’m looking at it now, and it does a convincing job of pretending that the startup is already up and running. A worm wiggles its way across the screen, inviting you to scroll down. You’re told about the science behind the technology using very simple line illustrations — in fact, they’re literally just doodles. In her thesis, Ele says that at the beginning, these illustrations were exactly that, just doodles. But everybody thought they were so accessible that she just kept the style.
So the concepts of plastic breakdown and their current lab work are all shown in the form of squiggly lines and cute animations. Every part of the website — from the colours and the gently rounded font to the language used — is deliberately used to make the content simple and inviting. You can check out the website at beworm.org.
The thing about the scientific community is that there aren’t too many incentives to make large claims of your work, unlike in politics or in the start-up world. Scientists tend to be on the fence most of the time, and for good reason. They play it safe, with disclaimers, hedges and the dreaded passive voice. But this is what makes scientific writing so unattractive for readers.
It occurs to me now that this is a problem that science writers have dealt with for decades now. They must find a way past these roadblocks and make it easier for the general reader to digest. In his book, The Sense of Style, the linguist Steven Pinker talks about what makes for good science writing. He says that scientists understand that:
…the world doesn’t just reveal itself to us, that we understand the world through our theories and constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions, and that our ways of understanding the world must constantly be scrutinised for hidden biases. It’s just that good writers don’t flaunt this anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully conceal it for clarity’s sake.
This is why designers are in the same boat as science writers. We designers are not trying to assert what scientists don’t dare assert yet, but we are trying to make it understandable. One of my favourite lines from Ele’s thesis is this:
“What is visualised is understood, and what’s understood is supported.”
Ele: It’s one of the most important skills of a designer and a lot of under-rate this: how powerful you are if you can make things tangible for people, if you can visualise ideas and make them easy to undersatnd. That’s actually a really good skill that nobody else — well, maybe not nobody else — that’s the most important skill that we have. We can also be proud of this. It’s not something that everybody can do. It was also a thing that the scientists appreciated. When they saw the website… I thought they would say, “Ah, this is childish how you represent our work. This is not something funny. You should be more serious about this.”
But it was the exact opposite. They were like, “Oh it’s so cool, it’s so funny! I wish everything in science was like that.” They were really happy about it. And most of them are also really nice and funny and cool people.
Ele: The thing about beworm is that it’s not something that we’re using right now, yet BUT if you show people what is possible and how the world could be, what we could do to make our world healthy again, then you can use design as a tool to sow people how things could be. Speculative design is a common tool to show different versions of the future.
We always think that there’s only going to be one future. But there are actually many futures and nobody knows which one is the one we’re going to live in.Bawa: Till we live it.
Ele: Right. But, with the things you do, you already pull yourself and society in one direction or the other. This is what speculative design does. It shows you different versions and makes you choose. If you see something, you can imagine how it could be. This is what Black mirror does. They show you different versions of the future — most of them negative — in order to make you reflect. If you see somebody using a lens that records your memories or something like that, most of us are shocked by that. Most of us are like, “I don’t want to live in that future.”
You can also do it in the opposite way, you can show people the good ways.
This is what Ele did with her master thesis, showing a future where biotic recycling is part of the everyday. And this was in October of last year. Since then, she’s been up to some more interesting things. We met for a second time a couple of weeks ago and I asked her for updates.
Ele: Yeah, the beautiful thing about this speculative design, is that it’s not so speculative anymore. It’s actually a start-up now. I got from the speculative part to the really real part, where we won some funding for the idea and are seriously trying to realise the idea. This makes it way more difficult but also way more interesting. We’re working with a lot of biologists now. We got two more biologists on the team and are doing more experiments. The experiments will be more about the microbiome of the worm — the inside of the worm and what’s happening there. And this will always be the way to make the process more efficient.
So the big goal is to develop a biocatalytic recycling process that can be scaled up. We’re not going to sell a bio-reactor or something physical. We’re going to sell licenses and patents, hopefully.
That got real pretty fast. Now she’s talking about licenses, patents and efficiency. This is my favourite part about speculative design. It starts off as something seemingly innocuous, but sets off chain reactions that end up being quite influential — to society and to individuals.
In 1968, Matti Suuronen designed a ski cabin.
And 50 years later, it inspired the Futuro 5050 exhibition, which led Ele to her project Neuland with the floating islands, where she discovered these wonderful worms, which led to her doing research on them and writing her master thesis on it and now, she’s part of a very real start-up, beworm.
Ele: Sometimes I wake up and I think, “you’re founding a biotechnology start-up . How did we get to this point in life where we’re trying to build up a startup that has to do with biotechnology and wax worms?” (Laughs)
As we spoke about in that first conversation, we can’t tell which future we will live, till we’ve lived it. Ele couldn’t have known she’d be doing this, till she did it. But we must understand that it is up to us to choose. As I listen back to this conversation that I had with Ele, I feel like we are in this constant negotiation with the future.
You know how when you’re buying something at a flea market, and you offer an unrealistically low price knowing full well that the seller is going to push back on it and drive the price up? And this continues till you’re both happy with the final price. But it’s critical that you start low with your first pitch, otherwise you’ll end up paying too much for it. Right?
I think that science fiction and speculative design are this first pitch when we’re negotiating for our future. As we approach the possible future, the forces of technical feasibility and viability kick in. Scientists and engineers will try to figure out what’s really doable, the governments and the corporations will resist the change and the needle will eventually come to rest at a possible future. But it’s up to the artists, the science fiction writers and the designers to make that first pitch.
This is a transcript of the first episode of Cognitive Snap. Listen now on your favourite podcast app.
To see more of Ele and this project, please visit beworm.org
