Scott Rettberg: Today, I’m here with Sarah Edmonds -Martin from the University of Notre Dame, who is also currently the digital culture Fulbright researcher at the University of Bergen. And today we’re going to talk about speculative design. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Thanks, Scott. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah, it’s great to have you. And can you say just a little bit about your career as a researcher so far?

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah, so I kind of came to design as a synthesis of interest in literature, which I have a degree in, interest in studio practice as a creative, which I also have a degree in, and then my interest in how both of those things apply to culture.

Design for me really is a sociocultural, both artifact, but also form, that I see through my work, both creative research creation, but also as a researcher. So I write about design. I see design as both being an artifact of and an influence on culture. But I really do kind of bring both of those sides to to design.

And it has led me to speculative design over the past few years. And actually, you know, speculative design as a term was coined in the 90s, took a little while to kind of trickle through design scholarship and academia. But it really does describe, I think, a lot of iterative practice that designers either are doing or want to do.

Scott Rettberg: So I didn’t know you studied literature. Was that undergrad or was that…?

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah.

Scott Rettberg: And then you went into design after that. So, storytelling is a part of what you do, sort of built into it…

Sarah Edmands Martin: Absolutely. And storytelling as a form is something that I see both kind of studio practice, literature and design kind of sharing - as a formal element. So, language, you know, the language of storytelling, the structure of storytelling in literature, it has its own forms and rhetorics, but so does studio practice. So, the visual language of various shapes, colors, hierarchies, all of those forms are also kind of tools to tell stories and design brings both of those together, right? So, we have text, the language of typography, and everything that comes with a written language is also combined with visual language to influence and communicate with our sensorium.

Scott Rettberg: Great. Yeah. So back to speculative design. Speculative suggests to me the future, thinking about the future.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Speculative design is kind of coined in the 90s by Dunne and Rabi. It focuses more on the process of design as a place for thinking and imagining, so it’s not necessarily the end product, although the end product is important.

Speculative design really kind of happens in the mind of a viewer, of a user, and they have this nice differentiation, which I take up in my work as well, as speculative design - or design maybe more general - as closer and more connected to the everyday as this really important distinction from something like fine art, which can be really radical, but often exists within a white gallery space or can be kind of pushed aside because it is “quote-unquote” art.

Whereas design, because it interacts with us on an everyday basis, is pedestrian in many senses. It actually has more capabilities to shake us out of our routine, shake us out of our norm, shake us out of our apathy. We don’t notice it, but it’s always there. So when it’s slightly off and when it takes the bent of speculative, right, it can really do more work than, let’s say, art, which we might see and, to paraphrase, be like, “oh, that’s so interesting” but it remains in a gallery.

Whereas design is used. It’s functional. It’s embedded in the way that we move through the world, whether that’s through the brands that we take up to represent our identities or in the very devices or objects that we use to navigate the world. So again, because it is so practical, the practical essence of design allows it to actually be, they don’t say this, but I would maybe argue, more radical when it’s speculative because it interrupts us.

It’s a friction that’s actually quite productive when used well. So speculative design is a kind of design, sort of like critical design, causes us to pause and again in our minds think of well if this could be possible what else could be possible. And it doesn’t propose the end solution. It doesn’t say well this is exactly how it should be. It sort of is the thing that asks you to consider other ways of being without prescribing what that other way of being might be. I really love that idea because it also goes back to the way I think design kind of works on a formulaic level.

There’s a designer, he works for Pentagram, very well known in the world of branding, Michael Beirut, who says that design happens 70 % through his work or the work of a designer and 30 % in the mind of a viewer.

And maybe I’ve gotten those percentages flip -flopped, I don’t know. But basically, the idea is…

Scott Rettberg: To provoke something.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah. But you actually complete the design through looking at it, through figuring out. It’s like a puzzle that I’ve started, but you complete. The wit, the implication of the design is actually reliant on an audience to finish it. And there’s an elegance to that that I really enjoy. I’m talking about effective, compelling design. I’m not talking about the everyday crap.

Scott Rettberg: The stuff that AI could do for you.

Sarah Edmands Martin: That AI could do for you, or as designers we’ve all probably encountered at some point. That’s not design at its best. And I think speculative design fits within that kind of trajectory of design being not just about problem solving but also about problem making and that making again it happens

Scott Rettberg: Through sort of “good trouble”.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Good trouble! Yes. Which funnily enough, quick anecdote, when I was really little my elementary school bus driver nicknamed me trouble… with a capital T. So I have a long history of being a troublemaker, but I’ve just made it my profession, and people pay me for it now.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah, it’s good to get paid to be trouble. Could you maybe give an example or two of speculative design in your own work?

Sarah Edmands Martin: Sure. So right now I’m working on a project with Riddles. I’m researching here through the CDN and digital culture, but also the ethno-folkloristic archive?

Scott Rettberg: Folklore archive.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yes, folklore. Norwegian folklore. I’ve been practicing my Norwegian. But the folks who have been collecting and archiving Norwegian, but kind of more broadly Scandinavian folklore here in Bergen, and in combination with grants and money, connecting Oslo and Bergen and other institutions.

And one of the things that I found really interesting is these kind of like Old Norse riddles, these like structures and forms of kind of proposing a question through playful language that asks you to kind of solve that riddle through understanding the kind of puns and context of those words within that language. I’m using those right now to build an interactive exhibition that asks people to solve some of these riddles, some of which have never been like published in a creative work before.

And then through their answers, they’re actually logged and archived.

So I’m creating an archive that begins as soon as the exhibition deploys, as soon as it shows. So it’s actually kind of an archive from the future that’s actively being created. And I like this because there’s a lot of critique that one could leverage at an archive or at institutions that archive.

Scott Rettberg: Those sort of future archives?

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah, exactly. So, it’s got this kind of speculative bent to it because as you engage with it, you actively create the archive, and it is then an archive from the future.

Also, the code that I’m using, it delivers each riddle at an exponential interval, so you can’t solve all the riddles in one human lifetime.

So again, kind of asking a user as they engage with this piece to imagine deep time and archives of the future that they are actively participating in creating, but may not have full agency over, in the same way that archives are this constant negotiation between, you know, power agency and display, or who displays it and when.

Scott Rettberg: And sort of deep time is kind of the idea of time that goes past the human lifespan or time that’s so extensive that we can’t really process it.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Exactly. I’m doing a lot of work right now to kind of gather footage of the beautiful Bergen forests and water. I did a Google search after just days of rain and Google revealed to me that Bergen is the rainiest city in Europe.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah. Some years there’s other towns in Norway that beat us out.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Oh really? I don’t believe that.

Scott Rettberg: Not most of the time.

Sarah Edmands Martin: I believe in you, Bergen. But all this is to say, I think it kind of as this idea, as I’m sort of working with it right now, connects to how our understanding of our place within a longer trajectory of time comes to influence our relationship to the natural world and our responsibilities to things like climate change and ecological crisis.

So I’m kind of building a little bit of that in there. And speculative design has this ability to open up our kind of like our aperture, as it were, to wicked problems, right?

Again, not offering solutions necessarily, but kind of introducing us to other possible futures so that we might collectively think through ways to deal with some of these “quote-unquote” wicked problems.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah. And some of your work I know is political to some extent, or taking a position. You did a project with the Mueller Report. For people who don’t know, what is the Mueller Report? And what were you trying to do with it?

Sarah Edmands Martin: So this is a project that is co -created between myself and one of my collaborators, Ann Barry, at Cleveland State, and this started where we were just kind of curious average American citizens.

The Mueller report comes out in 2019. It’s an investigative report published by the Department of Justice. It investigates foreign interference into U.S elections. It has multiple volumes, however, and the first volume tracks what were the interferences based on the investigation. The second volume is essentially the legal implications of that, given the U.S. constitution and the gray areas of that document to this uniquely technological moment, lots of deep fakes, misinformation, disinformation, social media, right?

Scott Rettberg: Trying to parse out what’s legal and what’s illegal. And also, who’s responsible.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Exactly. Who do we indict?

Scott Rettberg: Or not.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Could we? Right? It’s a really fascinating legal question. I mean, the whole document is incredibly fascinating

Scott Rettberg: And a lot of people forget that there actually was interference in the U.S elections.

Sarah Edmands Martin: There was. And it’s you know we’re gearing up for an election cycle. So there’s a evergreen quality to the problem here. And actually, so to more of a point, part of the problem really is that this is a designed object, you know, that the U.S government publishes.

Scott Rettberg: A poorly designed document.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Absolutely. We absolutely argue this. And so our first inclination as designers was to move through a very kind of like research creation, speculative design process. And so we, through an act of making, we teased this document apart, again, with the lens and perspective of this is a design failure. How can we, as designers, make this information more accessible?

Scott Rettberg: And you’re, of course, working in a digital medium. You’re producing things that are both analog and, in some cases, digital. I know that some of the things that you did with this were augmented reality.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah, absolutely. We wanted to honor the kind of print legacy of political protest posters. So we created a suite of protest posters, but also a visual language and guide for anyone else who would want to participate. So it’s very democratic in its dissemination. And, you know, we did a lot of research into, for example, typeface design and color palette and provided all these things for other creatives, or other citizens who would want to engage with the Mueller report.

All of the text that is built into these pieces verbatim comes from the report. So again, really trying to lift out the information and honor the way that design should serve broader publics. The objects of bureaucracy should serve the nation’s publics. But yes, there were print and analog components, and then there were kind of like sexy augmented reality, virtual, digital components, again, all to serve the purpose or the function of engaging people in a way that the U.S government Department of Justice did not.

That led us to this question of, like, why do the objects of bureaucracy not do this? Is it inherent to bureaucracy or is it something else? And where is design’s role in the objects of bureaucracy? Which goes back to the earliest civilizations. Typography and mark making and forms and organization of information, visual hierarchy, Lyou could find those in ancient Egyptian and ancient Sumerian bureaucratic documents, quote unquote. So that led us to these kinds of bigger questions that we’re now writing a book about.

Scott Rettberg: The title of the book going to be?

Sarah Edmands Martin: It’s called Ongoing Matter, Bureaucracy by Design. Right now,

working title. But the design process was speculative in that kind of initial research creation moment. Using design as a way to work through intuitive questions that we had.

And then from there, more research questions were created.

Scott Rettberg: I guess even if I think back to like the founding documents of the United States, for example, just looking visually at the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, they were much more visually interesting and appealing than these sort of black and white uniformly typeset documents that come out of the federal government today

Sarah Edmands Martin: In the month following the publication of the Mueller report, CNN poll cited three of Americans had read this document. So, you know, with such important information and that’s not to say.

Scott Rettberg: That’s actually a lot.

Sarah Edmands Martin: And people debate that number too, right? We do an analysis of, a visual analysis of these documents. They’re really hard to get all the way through. We’re not indicting the American public for not reading a 448 page, what’s called a “dumb PDF”, right?

You can’t even search it. You can’t even highlight it. Now you can. They did eventually start unredacting and making the PDF more accessible. But at its first publication, this thing was, it’s not like they made great typeface choices.

It’s a Roman typeface that is hard to read. It’s heavily redacted. A lot of the information is buried in footnotes as well. There’s also like a legalistic tone that’s very inaccessible to most American readers.

But the U.S taxpayer pays for these investigations and these documents. And ostensibly, again, these objects of bureaucracy are are meant for us, right, to inform us of what is going on with our government.

And these, in the case of the Mueller report, this foreign interference.

Scott Rettberg: So in your opinion, design influences the operations of democracy.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah, that’s one of the things that we that we argue. There’s a long history of design and democracy, coming together or being at odds with each other. You can look at things like propaganda from a variety of different perspectives and see the power and danger of design as being this method of messaging. It’s a finely balanced blade, right?

And I think educating a public or publics rather, on the agency and power and potential of design, is also really important. So one of the things that we’re looking at with this project as well is is something like education and pedagogy when it comes to design and politics and bring it you know are there models to bring that in earlier to education so that this kind of messaging isn’t something that you come to so late in life or it can be maybe used against you.

Scott Rettberg: Let’s talk about some of the other types of projects that you do. I know, for example, that now you’re working on a game.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah, so Patrick Jagoda from University of Chicago and I have been collaborating on a series of game rule sets. One of these rule sets, speaking of specular design, all of them point to possible worlds. So it’s very speculative in its origins. One of these rule sets is looking at the adventure game as a form, and so its form then takes on digital choose -your -own -adventure game.

Scott Rettberg: Kind of electronic literature.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s built on Twine. There are moments where the form of the adventure game as kind of this extension of colonial ideology is critiqued, but also because you are actively playing it, right? You start to have agency over what occurs in the game, so you’re complicit in some ways. There are moments where the text adventure kind of spirals into these dead ends, and you literally get lost in the game.

I’ve been making these animations and illustrations that build out the world just enough for a viewer to start to get a kind of dark sense of the implications of what we’re kind of critiquing through the form.

So, we’re going to show that exhibit that actually in a couple of weeks for the first time, do a play test in Poland. We’re pushing that right now, really finalizing all of those components, making sure it works the way we hope it will, and then doing a play test.

Scott Rettberg: Let’s come back to that idea of, so you are exhibiting work in a gallery, and you do a lot of shows like that, and you were sort of making this distinction between fine art and design, which is funny whenever I talk to artists and designers. I always sort of have kind of a harder time making the distinction. It’s a right-side, left-side brain sort of thing, at least the way that they think of it. But when you think about, ideally, how would your work get out there? You talked about things getting out into everyday life. Would you do cereal boxes?

Sarah Edmands Martin: Well, I have you know worked in the industry as a designer and I’ve had the privilege of working for big brands, not too dissimilar from Sarah Maxwell’s. More house and homewares. But I’ve also worked for academic institutions that, again, design plays this large role in taking the ideas that could potentially improve people’s lives.

I worked with a company called IonQ, which was the first public quantum computing company based just outside of Washington, D.C, to explain what, for example, quantum computing is, and give the public better access to a story that they can understand both the power and the dangers of this kind of technology and the implications of how it’s gonna change in the coming years, how we live our lives.

I’ve worked for big brands in a much more commercial aspect before I came back to academia, but what drew me back was this ability that I think design has to tell stories about ideas in a way that can actually make a difference. I do also show work in a gallery because sometimes that storytelling, I think, can work really well within that kind of critical design, slightly more artistic space.

Scott Rettberg: And you sort of gather people’s attention and they know why they’re there. It’s just satisfying, right? People interacting with it, asking you questions.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Absolutely. It’s also an established route. There are methods just like commercial methods where the best way at this moment might be something like a gallery show, or it might be something like a small product. A limited run.

Our project, the speculative kind of other world project, it’s actually called Otherworldly Games. It’s a working title; we’re still working on it. We’re hoping to pitch that to more fiction-based presses. So again, a much more publicly accessible outlet, for the exact purpose that you’re bringing up is we actually hope people will engage with this. And it’s also a game. It’s written in a language that is far more accessible than, Anna and I’s book on bureaucracy.

Scott Rettberg: Although you’re probably trying to tell a story there as well.

Sarah Edmands Martin: Of course. It’s just, you know, pitched a little in a different kind of tone. And so to your point, I think, you know, using the established outlets that we have and exploring and experimenting with new ones. We’ll see how it goes.

Scott Rettberg: How do your students, and I’m just thinking about what type of students you probably encounter in a design program, how do they respond to speculative design, and do you think that they’re able to kind of take this into, I’m guessing most of them end up in commercial and industry?

Sarah Edmands Martin: It’s a mix. We run a program that is flexible enough that students can go into academia. There is a graduate program in Design. Part of my department is industrial design, which is historically much more kind of commercially oriented.

I really enjoy working alongside my colleague who sometimes are much closer to kind of practitioner side of design than I am as a speculative designer, because there’s a reality to that work that I think we don’t want to move too far away from as designers. Again, as Don and Robby argue, the everyday kind of practical constraint of design is actually where a lot of its power can lie.

Our students, you know, there are a lot of them that go into industry and we prepare them for that. But I also think design and industry benefits from that kind of embedded idea in whatever you are selling, whether that’s most of the time actually still a story or a story through a product, a story through a brand, a story through an experience. And we teach our students how to shape ideas through visual and written language. They can then take that both into the commercial space but also into more speculative spaces that something like academia really allows the kind of freedom to explore.

My most recent graduate students got a tenure track job as a designer in the U.S and I have students that are current grad student right now, working sort of in a speculative space, but with music performance and deploying design around ideas of like kinship into kind of music venue festivals, venue performance spaces. So, there’s a practical component there as well as this conceptual component. And we also, in our department, we have design, studio practice, and art history. It’s a really lovely blend of practice and theory.

I think that I’m not the only faculty member who really kind of blends those together and can kind of flex and move across them to both provide students with examples, but also show that they’re, I personally don’t think there’s such a hard line between them, but I’m also a product of that kind of environment. Very liberal artist. Out of the humanities and design and literature.

Scott Rettberg: What type of literature did you, was it sort of a general degree or did you kind of?

Sarah Edmands Martin: It was a general degree. I did end up focusing on romanticism and Victorian literature.

Scott Rettberg: Great. Well, I could see how that would lead to design.

Sarah Edmands Martin: You know, sagas, myths. University of Maryland is where I got my undergraduate degrees and we had some really amazing Tolkien scholars and myth folklore scholars at the time that I was moving through there, and Romanticism and Victorian literature folks. Very much a product of that environment.

Scott Rettberg: That’s great. Maybe just a couple more questions before we go. One is this sort of a side question. but I was just thinking about your experience as a designer, and AI is something that’s probably going to change the field. And I was just wondering sort of how you feel about that, and maybe do your students have anxieties, fears, or see opportunities as a result of what’s happening there?

Sarah Edmands Martin: Yeah. I actually worked with two colleagues of mine, one from my former institution, Caleb Weintraub, who’s a painter who actually uses AI in his paintings, and a philosophy faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, Patrick Yemez. We hosted a symposium, it must have been like a year and a half now ago, where we were really like thinking about, from these three perspectives, design, studio practice and ethics and philosophy, what are the implications on creativity with AI?

And there were a number of really interesting questions that came up from an ethics point of view, also intellectual property point of view, legal kind of perspectives.

I see design as part of an iterative process and AI can be built into that process. For example, as a way to survey what is already out there, aka cliché. So with our undergrad students, for example, this last year, we integrated AI in that particular step within a creative process. It was pedagogical in the way that we were educating students on the creative process through design and how to sidestep cliché, how to negotiate cliché, which has been there forever. It’s always part of an artist or designer’s kind of process or should be. How to leverage this technology ethically.

I don’t know if there’s a hundred percent way to do that right now, but showing that how to build AI, a generative AI, into their process in a way that maybe just shows them what the landscape of shape or form might look like given certain keywords, then you can avoid that cliche. Not relying on AI as this kind of finishing or polishing or doing the work for you because it won’t do the work for you, at least not the way that design really should be practiced. Design is this mediator between problems and an audience. And there’s a humanness to understanding what the problem is and bringing your audience into that problem solving that an AI isn’t going to be able to do.

Scott Rettberg: Great. Yeah, one last question. I noticed that Virtually all the projects you’ve been talking about, maybe not the folklore one, but virtually all the projects you talk about are collaborative. And I was wondering, just people who I’ve talked to kind of have different perspectives. I always, when I’m doing creative work, pretty much always I collaborate with other people in digital media. But I was wondering, in terms of your process, how important is that? And also, do you think about different types of roles that people have in collaborations?

Sarah Edmands Martin: Absolutely. I mean, it’s very natural as a designer to collaborate. It’s a studio.

Scott Rettberg: You always have a customer.

Sarah Edmands Martin: You always have a customer. You’re always thinking also about the audience. And in so many ways, you are collaborating with your final user just as much as you are with the person who is signing the checks.

Design is, by its nature, collaborative, I would argue. And I have a really wonderful cohort and network of artists and thinkers and designers, makers and theorists who augment my own thinking about my work, either through conversations, which I would consider a collaboration, or really direct collaborations like what I described with Anne, an ongoing matter, which again began with a text message that was like, “have you read this?” And then it was like, “okay, I’m making my way through it. I have questions. Let’s talk about them”. And again, through the research creation process, that then generates more questions, more research questions.

Or someone like Patrick where, you know, we each really represent a different perspective on this idea of other worlds. He’s a game designer, I’m a designer. He has an English background in a different way than I have an English background. And so when we bring them together, it’s just blending all of these really weird ideas.

And there’s lots of opportunity to catch your own biases or to have your biases caught or critiqued or pushed. And I personally, again, I also have a background in a studio practice where you put up your work and people come in and they have questions. And that process of critique is so valuable. And so I build that into as many of my own projects as I can. Even when I might be like the sole author on something, there are those critique moments where I invite people in at various stages of my work and of my process. And I teach my students to do that too.

I think it’s a very healthy and ethical way to be a creative.

Scott Rettberg: Great. Well, thanks so much, Sarah. It’s been really nice talking with you.

It’s been great. Thanks for having me.

Works cited

Bierut, M. 2015. How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world. United Kingdom: Thames & Hudson.

Berry, Anne, H., & Sarah Edmands Martin. 2020-2021. Ongoing Matter. Exhibitions at The Galleries at CSA, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Cleveland State University, and The Cook Center Galleries, Maxwell Hall, Indiana University.

Jagoda, Patrick, & Sarah Edmands Martin. In Progress. Otherworldly Games: An Atlas of Possible Realities.

This research is partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centers of Excellence program, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative and project number 335129, Extending Digital Narrative.