Why imagine the unfeasible?
When you look at a beautiful design such as the Crystal Palace in 1851, what you don’t see are the hundreds of archived designs that sit collecting dust and rotting away. Most design work doesn’t always materialise for the audience but rather represents the ghosts of paths untaken.
Working as product designers in a corporate environment, not in a futures department, we constantly try to plan and execute what might be feasible. I get stuck designing what’s feasible now and hold back from pushing right to the cliff’s edge with a design or idea. I get easily influenced by solving the immediate problem ahead. There is a constant dichotomy between applying more effort to solve for the future versus scrambling and plugging the hole today. How do we know if there is value in imagining and designing for a future state?
I was recently inspired by the concept of Architecture Parlante. When literally translated, it means speaking architecture. There isn’t a focus on the feasibility and whether it can actually be built, but rather the symbolic meaning and what ideas are evoked from the design. In essence, the design speaks to a concept. It’s an imaginative and visionary concept that allows us to escape the box of what is feasible today and allow our minds to unlock a novelty.
The concept comes from Etienne-Louis Boullee, a visionary architect. He was an 18th Century architect interested in using architecture as a means of social utility and informing a new future state. He was also known as an architectural figure of the Enlightenment period. He is well known for his proposal of a Cenotaph (a funerary monument) for Sir Isaac Newton. His architectural proposals were symbolic and allowed us to think about visionary concepts through the medium of architectural drawings.
Let’s explore how an imaginary concept helps inform a viewpoint and understanding of a concept.
How might it be useful?
Mo Gawdat, in his book Solve for Happy, creates a dynamic visual known as “Project Cockpit”. Here he creates a powerful image for us to understand how unfeasible it is to be able to control every aspect of our life. He tells us to imagine that advanced technology has enabled a cockpit with all the switches to control every aspect of your life. You can control your next promotion, your daughter’s behaviour, traffic that day etc. He highlights how gigantic this cockpit would have to be; it would have to be the size of a football stadium to cover the plethora of parameters that affect our lives. He crystallises the image by adding how difficult it would be to keep running between different buzzing details to keep making changes. Even if you kept running faster and faster, it would soon grow unmanageable.
It is this powerful, detailed story that helps us understand the lack of feasibility in controlling every parameter of our life. The power lies in understanding the imaginary concept to be able to realise the impossibility. The imaginary concept proves as an important discussion medium to illustrate his point. Therefore, it’s an important tool in his argument.
When could an imaginary concept be impractical?
It’s important to take another angle and consider the impracticality of a futuristic visionary concept. Peter Reinhardt, the founder of Segment, gave an important lecture at Stanford University on Product-Market Fit. He begins by restating a famous Hockey principle, known as Skating to where the puck should be, rather than focusing on where it is now. However, he argues that the reason why start-ups and businesses fail is that they don’t solve a real customer problem today but solve a problem that no one has. Peter founded Segment, the customer data platform which draws real-time data for customers across platforms into one place. This was something he found businesses lacked, where individuals from marketing could not access data on their customers instantly and had to keep asking colleagues from data analytics to constantly pull this data in a desired format. Peter’s lecture is an important reminder that when it comes to a successful business, imaginary future concepts are not the backbone. The stability of a business is in providing customers with a solution to a problem they have today, not designing for future states.
So do we still create visionary future designs?
As designers, we’re easily drawn to all the possibilities and excitement that exist in producing designs as part of imaginary work or concepts. And it’s important not to lose our enthusiasm when designing for an ideal future state during work. Rather than eliminating or not exploring the possibility, it’s important to understand the value that an imaginary future design can bring to the feasible short-term design. The artefact of an ideal future state design is a valuable speaking piece between different stakeholders to find a shared future vision. This design allows for the powerful visualisation behind verbal concepts, as shown in the example of the ‘project cockpit’. As a product designer, the unfeasible artefact or visionary mock-up opens the doors to feedback from a technical standpoint.
A professor of mine once stated, “It’s easier to scale a large idea down than scale a small idea up”. The purpose was to encourage designers to explore concepts and ideas that seemed far from feasible and to push boundaries. Early initial designs can be used as an exploratory path towards the final feasible design solution. It’s important to keep the spirit and fervour of using design as a medium of exploration in projects, even if the exploratory design is archived in the design process. The power of imagining or creating future state conceptual designs illuminates the path towards the final design and increases creativity and innovation in the project.
