While I've stated many times before that I am no writer, I used to be a reader. Since childhood, I've always been invested in the worlds created by books. When paired with my dyslexia, this interest played a big role in getting me through my english/humanities classes throughout my academic career. As stated by Lubomír Doležel, the worlds " we are most interested in are not just for entertainment but for reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration". These qualities of good writing can be shown in all of my favorite books from the well known, Fahrenheit 451, to the less popular, The Stranger or even The Pillowman. 

I really resonated with the quote: "art at its purest—noninstrumental, personal, subjective, and profoundly beautiful." My favorite kind of art is personal and means something to the artist or to its viewers. The art might start a conversation, or send a message, or even just get the viewer to shift their perspective and think a little differently. 

Utopias and dystopias are everywhere in literary fiction and other forms of world design. Books like Fahrenheit 451 or The Giver show worlds where so many aspects of their real-world are hidden from the people in the book. Our current-day dystopia might not be as secretive as those societies but it makes the reader wonder what "Big Brother" is hiding from its citizens. 

I liked the quote regarding utopias as "somewhere to aim for rather than build". This is the key to an inclusive utopia because a utopia for one person might not be a utopia for someone else. This is where ideas from Nazism,  Fascism, and Stalinism come into play, obviously, these utopian societies are not good for everyone which is why they only survive in small groups. The imagination of a utopia, however, doesn't hurt anyone AND gives the world an idea of what could be possible (if it works out well for everyone). This also allows others to add to these utopias to make them more inclusive and not just one world from ONE person's imagination. 

As you could possibly guess by now, distopias are my favorite to indulge in. "[C]autionary tales warning us of what might
lay ahead if we are not careful." These worlds are crucial to showing where some "utopias" fall short. It's easy to tell someone their utopia isn't good for everyone, but it's more powerful to show them the world they'll create if their ideas are actualized. The outcome almost never justifies the means. 

The social and ethical implications of any speculated world become salient within the dystopian speculation of said world (such as  Oryx and Crake). 

I really enjoyed reading about Thomas Thwaites's The Toaster Project. As an engineer who has attempted to "remake the wheel" in order to see how some of our everyday tools work (such as toasters), I have also found that the methods required to make these machines is completely absurd. Now I understand the common engineering saying: "never remake the wheel" if it exists, take it and build off of it to prove that what your making is better than what you originally stole. 

A similar project,  James Chambers’s Attenborough Design Group, is a completely new and innovative way of thinking about new technology. The question posed by the group is, what if technology could have animalistic survival instincts. They created "a Gesundheit radio, which sneezes periodically to expel potentially damaging dust, and Floppy Legs, a portable floppy disc drive that stands up if it detects liquid nearby". Inventions like these are the kind I have never seen before. Remixing biological and animalistic instincts into everyday technology is something that might seem ridiculous when you're trying to make your machine sneeze, however, self-cleaning technology doesn't really exist yet and could hold unparalleled benefits to long-lasting products. I haven't even considered the " added benefit of creating strong emotional ties with their owners because of carefully designed animal-like behaviors that encourage people to project emotions onto them."

The apocalyptic "what-ifs" are also interesting to explore. From invasions of aliens to killer plants, these ideas help prepare us for the unpreparable. A movie in this genre that Speculative Everything didn't mention is Cloverfield. The movie is taken from the perspective of the citizens in a city invaded by monsters, it is unknown where the monsters came from but it is hinted that they are the result of a scientific experiment. The movie shows the horror from the people's point of view of what could happen if you're stuck in the middle of an apocalypse. 

A crucial question to ask when designing other worlds is: "What happens when speculations move from behind the screen or from the pages of a book to coexist in the same space as the viewer?"

A setback in design I thought was explained very well in Speculative Everything is design's connection to industries' dreams. Design has become so enveloped in industry, it has gotten much harder for design to set its own dreams or even society's dreams. The key to this is to create realities that address the people rather than the consumer. Design shouldn't be limited to any type of person but rather the possibilities of every person in order to uncover everything we can and cannot become.