"How do you design for unreality"? This is the question that starts off the chapter which explores different aesthetics for unreality and different ways to approach this abstract concept. Unreality can be described as the "unreal, parallel, impossible, unknown, and yet-to-exist". I liked this way of describing unreality as the word is such an open-ended idea it is hard to narrow down what fits inside it. These other synonyms of unreality help to shape the meaning of the word in terms of design. Designs based on unreality help to engage people with complex ideas, these ideas sometimes don't tell the whole story of the design, and that's ok. Unlike film props, unreal design shows a snippet of another world and allows the viewer to build the world around the object being presented. Making something that references what is already known is a helpful way to illustrate some sort of realness in the design, however, too much reference to realism takes away from the message of the unreal design. 

CGI is a huge source of unreality. One problem with it, however, is the programs used today don't allow for full artistic freedom. Sometimes CGI tends to look similar even if the ideas are vastly different. I did like the concept of "CGI to present mixed realities" which entails mixing the real world with the digital (similar to AR). This is a very useful way to communicate ideas for AR devices without having to put in the time to make a whole AR design. Another aspect of CGI I found very interesting was its use of it to make disturbing but powerful images. For example, the image of a child with a grown woman's arm holding a cigarette to bring awareness to secondhand smoke affecting children of parents who smoke. The image is quite disturbing and even more powerful, it catches the viewer's eye and (like a car crash) you just can't look away. It is a beautiful design that steps away from the speculative design of possible futures and brings the focus more on current social issues. 

Architecture is another interesting field that uses designs for unreality. Designs by John Hejduk prove that not all architectural designs have to follow the laws of physics, but can be a place where imagination and speculative design, build off each other and are allowed to fun wild. Some really interesting and mind-bending designs come out of designing for unreality. One of my favorite designs illustrated in Speculative Everything is the design by Paul Noble titled Public Toilet. It reminds me of a musical I was in my high school did a few years ago called Urinetown. Urinetown takes place in a dystopian world where a water shortage and a 20-year drought have led to a government ban on public toilets which have been replaced by paid public toilets, owned by a single company. If the poor don't follow the strict laws prohibiting free urination, they would be sent to the mysterious "Urinetown" (which we later learn doesn't really exist and is just a cover story for the company that kills people if they are caught breaking the law). I especially liked Paul Noble's idea to make the 3D buildings in the shape of words, although this might never happen in reality, an unreal reality has no such restrictions. 

I found the work of Rene Laloux to be a very intriguing use of speculative design. I have always wondered what the world would be like if we had a different technological revolution besides the industrial revolution. In Fantastic Planet the artist/designer Rene Laloux illustrates what the world could look like if biotechnology was the main form of technology (rather than electromechanical). The exploration of this fantastic world blew me away from what we could've accomplished if we had just pooled our resources into a different type of technology. Maybe someday in a not-so-distant future humanity will experience another technological revolution that will change the course of technology we are building for ourselves right now. Another work of art within the same vein as Fantastic Planet is one that plays with the idea of products "growing on trees". You might've heard the expression before "[x] doesn't grow on trees", but what if it could? Designer Daisy Ginsberg and Sasha Pohflepp bring this concept to life through their work in Growth Assembly where they present their ideas for grown product parts. This work is highly imaginative and extremely inspirational for an engineer who usually has a mechanical frame of mind.

A piece of work that is set apart from the rest is the work from Filip Dujardin's Fictions in which he uses photography to illustrate a design concept instead of drawing it. To me, this form of art is way more approachable than drawing because I have a hard time getting any idea in my brain onto paper through just a pencil. This way of designing opens up a whole new door for people like me who are intimidated by drawing.

Something I appreciate about speculative design is the connection it has to storytelling. In The MacGuffin Library, designers use their talents as designers/artists to tell a story with an object. Without any words accompanying the product, the story is left up to the viewer to decode the story behind the object. With each story being different for each viewer, the art piece is connected to each individual who creates their own world around it. I find this tactic of storytelling more powerful than words.

One thing that always bothers me about cars nowadays is they all tend to look the same. In Joey Ruiter's work: Moto Undone and Marijin Van Der Poll's Modular Var both pieces strip away the social ideas of what a vehicle should look like down to the bare minimum (as shown above). Car companies could take some notes from designers who don't fall into the traditional visual categories that we see on the road pretty much every day. As Speculative Design states on the following page, "rather than mimicking the world as it is, construct a novel reality". This could be in terms of cars, other motor vehicles, architecture, technology, fashion, and so many more. 

A special feature of design that stems from its ability to allow the viewer to construct meaning around the piece is design's ability to initiate a thought experiment. This could be in the form of a thought experiment or even bringing awareness to a social issue our world is dealing with today. The artist Jorgen Leth does this by placing people in a "white box" or a blank environment in which the viewer can project their own thought into what the world around this person looks like. Design influenced thought experiments are also initiated by Lucinda Devlin's Electric Chair which is simply a photo series of electric chair rooms. The goal of this is to show the viewer places that exist in our world made for one despicable thing only, killing other humans. Although it is done in a "humane" way, the artist uses these photos to ask the question of: do designs like these belong in our world?