Decolonizing Speculative Design Through Sonic Fiction Pedro JS

Design at the Earview: Decolonizing Speculative Design through Sonic Fiction Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira

Introduction As indicated by the rhythmic, bass-driven thumping that precedes any moment of suspense in movies, or the high-pitched crescendo 1 Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, that suddenly drops into silence with a boom in every THX-driven “Sound Studies: New Technologies and blockbuster film these days, music is a very powerful means of Music,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 635–48; and Jonathan denoting the future. In audio culture—that is, in the study of Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The sound, listening, and its practices—that one can understand much Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan about any social or political situation by looking at the sounds that Sterne (New York: Routledge Chapman populate it is a given. Within these disciplines, music is examined & Hall, 2012), 1–17. to its very core, taken apart and scrutinized under philosophy, 2 Holger Schulze, “Über Klänge Sprechen,” sociology, politics, media theory, and many other practices of [To speak about sounds] in Sound Studies: Traditionen - Methoden - scholarly knowing. Desiderate: Eine Einführung [Sound The growing interest in sound studies as an academic field Studies: Traditions - Methods - Desider- is a direct consequence not only of social and technological devel- ata: An Introduction], ed. Holger Schulze, opment, but also of the ubiquity of these technologies in everyday 1st ed. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008). life.1 Sound is observed in its aesthetic and functional qualities, its Original quote in German: “Sound Studies [sehen sich auch] als ein offenes effects and affects, its distribution and archiving; all these sonic Feld von Desideraten, die sich anders discourses and epistemologies inform the constitution of an audi- verstehen und anders angelegt sind als tory culture. The environment of sound studies is hence a trans- traditionelle Disziplinen im engeren disciplinary one—an “open field of desiderata [...] arranged and Sinne” (translated by the author). understood differently from proper traditional disciplines.”2 Sterne 3 Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 5. remarks that what differentiates a “sound studies approach” from 4 This relatively young practice has been given several different names to reflect other scientific, sociological, or artistic practices on sound is a different but similar approaches: These strong critical bias toward the subject.3 include critical design, design fictions, Similarly, speculative and critical design (SCD),4 as a adversarial design, and speculative branch and/or epistemology of design research, projects its design, among others. I deliberately efforts onto the future as a means of discussing the immediate choose to use the term “speculative and critical design” because the approach present. As a reflexive practice, it allegedly inquires about the serves the purpose of investigating status quo of society, about the status quo of technology, and near-future projections while maintaining about how the former relates to the latter; by removing “com- a critical nature. mercial constraints,” the practice seeks to stretch the limits of 5 James Auger, “Speculative Design: the possible as a way of re-imagining the world as it could be.5 Crafting the Speculation,” Digital Dunne, one of the pioneers of this approach, calls for an explo- Creativity 24, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 11–35, doi:10.1080/14626268.2013.7672 ration of the poetic and aesthetic qualities of objects, arguing 76; and Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: that the electronic object could “surprise and provoke [in order to] Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experi- ence, and Critical Design (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005). © 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00381 DesignIssues: Volume 32, Number 2 Spring 2016 43

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 provide a complex experience, critical and subversive.”6 The power of these poetic layers of apprehension of material culture lies in an “aesthetics of use”—that is, all of the intricate agendas that orbit around the cultural and social roles these objects play in life and that extend beyond issues of industrial manufacturing.7 As a critical practice, SCD aims to offer perspectives outside the “mainstream” of industrial design by crafting scenarios, products, and situations through which “a future” is hypothesized for provocation, reflection, and discussion. For Dunne and Raby, speculative and critical design projects “provide a space where new ideas about how we interact with each other, technology, and culture can be tested, presented, and communicated.... In them, we catch glimpses of how things could be if industry was a bit more imaginative and in tune with how people actually are.”8 As Auger puts it, by “observing and taking advantage of mundane, subtle, quirky but ultimately familiar behaviors or perceptions, the speculative designer can take the viewer on a journey to a technological future or alternate present that, whilst potentially alien, makes 6 Dunne, Hertzian Tales, 35. 9 7 Ibid., 48. perceptual sense.” 8 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, “Fic- Even though a myriad of speculative projects raise ques- tional Functions and Functional Fictions,” tions that would allow for a sound-based approach, seldom is this in Digital by Design: Crafting Technology path chosen. The intersection between SCD and sound studies is for Products and Environments, ed. Conny still just beginning to be explored, with only a few practitioners Freyer, Sebastien Noel, and Eva Rucki attending to how sound and listening give strong signals about (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 265. 10 9 Auger, “Speculative Design,” 26. possible futures. Tahiroğlu et al. have recently argued for a closer 10 See, e.g., Amina Abbas-Nazari’s “Across relationship between sound studies and design studies, claiming the Sonic Border,” http://di14.rca.ac.uk/ that sound as design might “spread the cognitive load between project/across-the-sonic-border-varia- sensory modalities, thus reducing the amount of information tions-on-50hz/ (accessed September 3, required on screen for visual processing.”11 Similarly, Franinović, 2014), and Elliott P. Montogmery, “Vehicular Acoustics Monitoring,” and Serafin point out the lack of attention paid to how artifacts www.epmid.com/w/monitoring.html sound, and hence propose a sound-based approach to interaction (accessed September 3, 2014). design—that is, to interaction paradigms conveyed through audi- 11 Koray Tahirogˇlu, Ogˇuzhan Özcan, and tory rather than visual cues.12 Both of these approaches, while in Antti Ikonen, “Sound in New Media themselves necessary and very fruitful, mostly concern design of and Design Studies,” Design Issues 30, sound at the frequency level—that is, design of proper sound no. 2 (Spring 2014): 59, doi:10.1162/ DESI_a_00262. waves and their affordances. 12 Karmen Franinovi´c and Stefania Serafin, Instead, I argue that, when speculating on how the future Sonic Interaction Design (Cambridge, could or will be devised, two approaches are necessary. First, a MA: MIT Press, 2013). stronger focus on how sound is designed is needed; and second, 13 Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the designers must look at the sonic narratives of designed artifacts Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998); Steve Goodman, that produce, mediate, and convey listening practices. In support Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the of the latter, I turn my object of study toward sonic fiction, a Ecology of Fear, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: rather idiosyncratic and poetic methodology for sound and cul- MIT Press, 2010); and Holger Schulze, tural studies conceived by theorist Kodwo Eshun and further “Adventures in Sonic Fiction: A Heuristic expanded by Goodman and Schulze.13 Sonic fiction approaches for Sound Studies,” Journal of Sonic auditory experiences from the bottom up, extracting theories of Studies 4, no. 1 (2013), http://journal. sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a10 sound and listening from record sleeves, liner notes, beats, and (accessed September 3, 2014).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 vibrations as a means to construct an augmented experience of sound. Even though Eshun focuses strongly on one specific medium—records from U.S.-American Afro-diasporic artists— I argue that such an approach could and should be used by SCD researchers, particularly by those from the global South. I examine the core characteristics of both practices, empha- sizing at first their similarities; my intention is to propose sonic fiction as a cogent epistemology (following Schulze) for SCD practice. However, more than just indicating how similar they might be in principle, I develop my argument toward addressing the question of whose futures are at stake in SCD projects, insofar as they differ significantly from those of sonic fictions. I do so by identifying several problems found in the current discourse in SCD literature. Hence, I argue not only that sonic fiction offers novelty to SCD when proposing a sound-driven approach, but also that it does so from a decolonial perspective.

Sonic Fiction as a Decolonial Epistemology of Sound Sound is perhaps the most powerful vector for communication. It reveals a good deal about the world, and yet the messages it is able to convey often go unnoticed. Through their sonic and auditory qualities, and consequently their musical outcomes, societies not only can be read, but also can be prefiguratively sensed. Think of church bells and how they function as a marker of daily duties, or how Muslim everyday life is punctuated by its call to prayers; think of how medical auscultation was fundamental not only to medicine in itself but also to the creation of individualized listening experiences;14 imagine post-industrial-revolution machine rhythms and the inception of Einstürzende Neubauten,15 or Burial and their dystopian sonic portrayal of a near-future London.16 Indeed, sound can be analyzed in myriad ways, such as its sociological value, anthropological nature, musical character, psycho- acoustic properties, or even how it is embedded into, and is a consequence of, design decisions. Still, the way Western culture has dealt with the role of sound and music in society has helped constrain it to a niche in which the primary means of accessing its complicated mechanisms is through a status granted by education and class, confined to extravagant concert halls and/or very closed academic circles, and within the economic reach of the bourgeois. Such analysis of music, listening, and its messages almost always assumes a top-

14 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: down approach—one in which a theory is applied to a vernacular Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction manifestation (as sound, listening practice, or music) as a means of (Durham, NC: Duke University framing it within a certain school of thought. What is mostly over- Press, 2003). looked, particularly within popular music, is the need to listen to 15 www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZsCvAB the messages the musicians themselves convey—sonically, mostly TX90 (accessed January 5, 2015). 16 www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ijVnXI- empirically, and driven by their own conceptions of what musical WBk (accessed January 5, 2015). theories might be.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 In this regard, for Eshun, “producers are already pop theo- rists.”17 His concept of “sonic fictions,” explained at length in his seminal work, More Brilliant than the Sun, denotes the myriad theories of the future initiated by African-American musicians during the 1950s with Sun Ra and his Arkestra, echoing all the way until the turn of the century with Drexciya and DJ Spooky, to name a few. Instead of looking at masterminds of musical revolutions such as Grandmaster Flash or George Clinton through the lenses of critical theory, ethnomusicology, and the like, Eshun unfolds these artists’ own concepts and how they are to be looked at as cogent ways of tapping into the future they portray in their work. He highlights the need for an understanding of sound that lies beyond the ear alone, asserting that in order to understand popular music one only needs to look at the records themselves. His sonic fictions are born out of the combination of sleeve notes, album covers, and the music itself, all composing a tale of an estranged future. This future is already there, unevenly distributed into grooves, sleeve paintings, and liner notes’ manifestos—fictional worlds filled with politics, coming into being the moment one grabs the record, con- tinuing in the process of dropping the needle, flipping the piece of vinyl from side A to side B, and finally inscribing itself in memory when it is over.18 In this process the dystopias of African-American culture come into play with the listener, abducting her from the physical limitations of listening—a “field trip through a found environment” of possibility spaces.19 Although much of the production of African American musicians is often highly abstract, it indeed has a theoretical character. For example, this character can be seen in Grandmaster Flash’s “skratchadelia,” where the turnta- bles (his “Wheels of Steel”20) become “a machine for building and melding mindstates from your record collection..., a tone generator, a defamiliarizer, a word-molecularizer.”21 It can be seen in Drexci- 17 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, -004. ya’s conceptualization in which African Americans are being 18 I am paraphrasing William Gibson’s reborn as water-living creatures,22 using “electronics to replay the famous quote, “the future is already alien abduction of slavery..., fictionaliz[ing] frequencies into sound here, just not evenly distributed,” found pictures of unreal environments.”23 in “The Science in Science Fiction,” Talk of the Nation (NPR, 1999), www.npr.org/ Eshun’s research focus is constrained to a very specific templates/story/story.php?storyId= medium (records), created by very specific subjects (afro-diasporic 1067220 (accessed September 3, 2014). musicians); yet the sonic fictions he unveils can also be found 19 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 66. elsewhere. For instance, Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare is a relent- 20 Listen to Grandmaster Flash’s “The Amaz- less travel among fictional and real pasts and futures, an othering Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” at www.youtube. wise-untold history of sound and power, although one using com/watch?v=gXNzMVLqIHg (accessed Western-centric theorizations and a very Deleuzian style of writ- January 5, 2015). ing. Still, his work bears a strong resemblance to a speculative 21 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, design project, but done so using essayistic writing as its medium. 14–15. There is, however, one key difference between Goodman’s work 22 Listen to Drexciya’s “Hydro Theory” at and the sonic fictions studied by Eshun: sonic fiction’s futures are www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9y9Snt1g5E (accessed January 5, 2015). 23 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 84.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 made both by and for the diasporic subject. For Eshun, Western- centric theories can only offer a means to talk about themselves and hence to speculate on their projections of what the future could, should, or would be—a “research and development depart- ment within a futures industry that dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow.”24 In other words, the experiences of the future that Western theory and culture propose are ones in which dystopia, uncer- tainty, and crisis doom Western societies. Eshun maintains that “Sonic Futurism always adopts a cruel, despotic, amoral attitude towards the human species.”25 African-American musicians understand this attitude very well, and so project themselves into worlds that no Western-centric view could ever imagine them to be in. In becoming aliens, superhumans, or even beings from parallel worlds, they hijack and turn into “fantasy” what the West has done and carries on doing: estranging, enslaving, othering: “You are the alien you are looking for.”26 He adds that Afro-futurism (i.e., the projection of Afro-diasporic subjects onto the future)27 ..uses extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and the constitution of Black Atlantic subjectivities: from slave to negro to coloured to evolué to black to African to African American.28

Eshun set out to signal that sonic fictions are to be found in records and inhabiting their own future and fictional universes. His modus operandi consists in finding these theories and “switching them on”29—that is, turning the fictions into personal narrations, plenti- ful with neologisms and very dense and highly ambiguous writing.30 For Eshun the text is the medium through which these 24 Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial fictions become research, even if they propose to break with tradi- Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 291, doi:10.1353/ tional and Eurocentric theories of how research in music and ncr.2003.0021. sound should be undertaken in the first place. He provoked the 25 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, -005. entire field of cultural studies by inventing new theories of sound, 26 Ibid., 84. parting ways with academic tradition, and writing his own justifi- 27 A more comprehensive account of Afrofu- 31 turism can be found in Lisa Yaszek, cations to sustain his arguments. “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the His attitude is of course not at all arbitrary. From the History of the Future,” Socialism and moment he refutes the colonialist undertones so frequently found Democracy 20, no. 3 (2006): 41–60, in academic theory, claiming that they “[subdue] music’s ambition, doi:10.1080/08854300600950236. [rein] it in, [restore] it to its proper place, [reconcile] it to its natu- 28 Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofu- rally belated fate,”32 he is crafting his own empirical research, turn- turism,” 298–99. 29 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 189. ing his attention to what the sounds themselves have to say. Sonic 30 Schulze, “Adventures in Sonic Fiction: A fictions are born and exist within an empirical individualism, and Heuristic for Sound Studies.” they generate an inter-semiological articulation of signifiers that is 31 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 193; critical and multilayered; they “place theory under the dominion and Schulze, “Adventures in Sonic Fic- of sonic affect, encouraging a conceptual mutation.”33 Sonic fictions tion: A Heuristic for Sound Studies.” 32 Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, -004. 33 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 82.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 are always unfolding themselves in a constant sense of “could be,” in which their “inner contradictions, ambiguities, and frictions” help craft an individual account of a sonic experience.34 Eshun’s sonic fictions are therefore a means by which the subaltern speak, sound, and unfold their knowledge as theory and culture.35 Sonic fictions are the proposal for a radical divorce from so-called universal (metropolitan and/or Eurocentric) theories of musicology and social and cultural studies, to make room for other systems to claim their space. In this regard, it clearly resonates with decolonial and southern theories, insofar as they all advocate for a rupture with what is commonly accepted as “neutral,” “classic,” “canonical,” or even “general.”36 It is a claim staked for looking otherwise, listening otherwise, and hence learning otherwise—for

34 Schulze, “Adventures in Sonic Fiction: A acknowledging scholarship coming from other fields and other Heuristic for Sound Studies.” parts of the world. Rather than following common practice—that 35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the is, the collection and mining of “data” from the South and then Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the applying Northern theories upon it—Eshun echoes other postcolo- Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson nial/decolonial authors in asserting that such “use at will” cannot (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, be acted out without considering the cultural contexts they helped 1988), 271–314. 36 Raewyn W. Connell, Southern Theory: destroy or at which they arrived, as well as the power relationships Social Science and the Global Dynamics engendered by enslavement and colonialism.37 of Knowledge, 1st ed. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007); Santiago Castro-Gómez, Speculative and Critical Design as a Delegation of Disaster “The Missing Chapter of Empire,” Critical design gained its name in the mid-1990s through Anthony Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 428–48, doi: 10.1080/0950238060 Dunne and Fiona Raby’s approach at the Royal College of Art in 38 1162639; Walter D. Mignolo, London. For them, critical design provides ways to “challenge “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, narrow assumptions,” “question the status quo,” “reflect on the nos. 2–3 (2007): 449–514, doi:10.1080/ impact of technology,” “spark debate,” and so on, as read in many 09502380601162647. instances of their (often manifesto-like) statements.39 To illustrate, I 37 Connell, Southern Theory; Eshun, More provide here an example of what is perhaps the most effective case Brilliant Than the Sun, 189–90; Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism”; of a critical design project: former RCA alumni Auger and Lilly Irani et al., “Postcolonial Computing: Loizeau’s Audio Tooth Implant. By creating a model of a tooth with A Lens on Design and Development” an embedded cellphone chip, they challenged their viewers to www.dourish.com/publications/2010/ reflect on whether such a pervasive mobile communication device chi2010-postcolonial.pdf (accessed would be desired for the near future. The project itself, like most September 3, 2014). 38 However, as they also argue, many other speculative design projects, was not real—although technologi- practitioners and researchers have been cally feasible. Yet many viewers believed it to be true, and several producing work that would fall under the mass-media outlets showed their prototype as if it were ready for category of critical design long before mass production, sparking reactions ranging from excitement to such a term existed. furious rebuke.40 Through design proposals like this one, which 39 Dunne, Hertzian Tales, xii, 86; Anthony challenge the viewer’s own beliefs and provoke reflection through Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, 1st ed. their uncanniness, SCD aspires to look at social, political, and eco- (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001), 59; Dunne and nomic change with questioning eyes. Raby, “Fictional Functions and Functional Fictions,” 266; and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 34. 40 Auger, “Speculative Design,” 20–22.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 However, for a practice that aims to be critical of society’s encounters with technology and at the same time to inquire about political subjects that govern and circle around these encounters, 41 Matt Kiem, “When the Most Radical SCD has thus far concerned itself only with the very “narrow Thing You Could Do Is Just Stop,” assumptions” it claimed it intended to challenge. As I and Medium, https://medium.com/@matt- others have argued elsewhere, the development of this discipline kiem/when-the-most-radical-thing-you- in European and North American universities has contributed could-do-is-just-stop-1be32db783c5 (accessed September 20, 2014); Cameron significantly to engagement by both practitioners and researchers Tonkinwise, “How We Future,” review in rather classist, racist, and colonialist stances in their questions of Speculative Everything, by Anthony and projects.41 Most of the reactions to these texts confirm Dunne and Fiona Raby (Cambridge MA: that these stances are not only overlooked and reinforced, but also MIT Press, 2014), www.academia. largely misunderstood as if they were a call to limit the application edu/7710031/DRAFT_-_How_We_ of these methods only to Northern-centered questions.42 Indeed, Future_-_Review_of_Dunne_and_Raby_ Speculative_Everything (accessed when claims are made that design is a language “pretty well September 20, 2014); Pedro J. S. Vieira understood in the west” (emphasis added) and are used to justify de Oliveira and Luiza Prado de O. Martins, a primary focus only on so-called “first-world issues,” the con- “Futuristic Gizmos, Conservative Ideals: stant and complete erasure of non-Western manifestations of On Anachronistic Design,” in Modes of design continues.43 Criticism, edited by Francisco Laranjo, 1st ed., 1:59–66. (London: Modes of The critique directed at SCD’s own dearth of criticism does Criticism, 2015). not come as an isolated matter. The discipline’s shortcomings reso- 42 Connell also observes this attitude in the nate well with and echo a need for design not only to address, but social sciences as a common excuse for to come into and manifest itself as, politics.44 As several authors the narrow perspectives of “Northern the- argue, a design practice concerned with the future of our society ories” of knowledge. (Connell, Southern must, inevitably, address the political—that is, the constitution of Theory, 10–18.) 43 Dunne was cited in Will Wiles, “Reality society as a constant interplay of different ideologies and their 45 Isn’t Working,” Disegno Daily, http://dis- debates. For design to leave the agendas of a few “elected repre- egnodaily.com/magazine/reality-isn-t- sentatives” and instead become a condition of contemporary life, working (accessed September 20, 2014). designers need to turn their viewers and users into “politicized (Emphasis by the author.) actors.”46 In turn, their design endeavors become confrontational 44 Tony Fry, Design as Politics (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). politics, inquiring into the already “taken for granted” to “liberate 47 45 Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design (Cam- action toward affirmative change ahead of the absolutely critical.” bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Mahmoud Indeed, SCD suffers in large part from a lack of responsi- Keshavarz and Ramia Mazé, “Design and bility and accountability for its own political questions. For Dissensus: Framing and Staging Partici- instance, Dunne and Raby’s discourse constantly speaks of design pation in Design Research,” DPP: Design as inherently tied to consumer culture and the agencies of capi- Philosophy Papers, no. 1 (2013), http:// desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/ talism. Their call is one for a critique of the futures “we” (as a paper1/dpp_paper1.html (accessed society) make real through buying, rather than challenging the September 3, 2014). need for buying things in the first place.48 Of course, not every 46 Carl DiSalvo, “Spectacles and Tropes: single SCD project must invariably address these questions, but to Speculative Design and Contemporary situate the “problems” of current decisions according to an indus- Food Cultures,” The Fibreculture Journal no. 20 (2012): 109–22; Fry, Design as try perspective, without coming closer to a serious questioning of Politics, 102–3; and DiSalvo, Adversarial the bigger picture, is one of the strongest drawbacks of SCD as a Design, 114. critical “attitude.”49 47 Fry, Design as Politics, 134. 48 Dunne and Raby, Speculative Everything, 49. 49 DiSalvo, “Spectacles and Tropes,” 118–120; Tonkinwise, “How We Future,” 13–15.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 When choosing to shift its focus to political questions, SCD’s dystopian worlds—usually portrayed by Northern designers—end up having much more in common with the realities of the global South than with those of science fiction. Civil unrest, famine, the police state, slavery, and other issues come into these scenarios very often as threats to the privileges of the “civilized” nations, while in fact such dangers are already an everyday reality for most of the “invisible” world, precisely because of actions perpetrated by the North in its recent past. Ironically enough, said dystopias are still presented in an elegant fashion, as exquisite solutions and normative assimilations of catastrophe—whether nuclear, infra- structural, biological, social, or other. With clear colonialist over- tones, a dystopian Europe incorporates into its consumer culture the consequences of world collapse, leaving the front-line burden of dealing with that collapse to other less economically and socially stable parts of the world. In other words, in SCD dystopias catastrophe is always elegant and depicted from a bourgeois point of view—perhaps because these scenarios account only for the very end of a rather long tail of delegated disasters.

Sonic Fiction as Speculative and Critical Design, or the Other Way Round Societies have long exercised power by way of sound and listening, but the extent of these actions very often remains unnoticed or overlooked.50 SCD, when understood as a strong disruptive practice, might use its ability to make futures tangible to turn these hidden and potential agencies of sound into palpable political questions; beyond that, it must do so not with the lenses of those who exert power, but instead by employing the voices of those whose futures are in danger. When observed side-by-side, SCD and sonic fiction do show some similarities in their constitutions as epistemologies: Both practices embrace ambiguity and subjectivity as part of their agenda; they (mostly) privilege empirical research over theorized assumptions; they understand the individual as an actor instead of as a marginal part of a larger statistical phenomenon; and they both begin with the idiosyncrasies of popular culture as a profuse source for research questions. However, the spheres within which these similarities are found differ significantly in their political aspirations; they might start out with very similar principles, but they arrive at completely different endpoints because their theoretical and empirical bases are intrinsically different. As I have shown, SCD largely posits itself as concerned with the surface layer of political action, looking primarily at what would eventu- ally jeopardize comfortable socioeconomic positions and the privi- 50 As seen in Jacques Attali, Noise: leges of an already well-established, mostly middle-class idealized Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Goodman, Sonic Warfare.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 society. Conversely, sonic fictions design futures coming from the eyes and ears of the other, and build their foundations on the theories and experiences of those alienated others. Although SCD might begin by assessing the particularities of a given subject, instead of beginning with general assumptions, it still does so by looking at vernacular manifestations under the auspices of classic theories. In contrast, from the moment sonic fictions understand that listening practices create different worlds for different listeners, it acknowledges that the listener and the theore- tician are one and the same. When sonic fictions unravel or dissect theories found in popular culture, they subvert the assumptions that critical discourses should not be part of mass culture, or that they should not be narrowed down “to the prosaic” of “aesthetically impoverished,” everyday experiences.51 Hence, when they open space for other subjects to speak, sonic fictions disrupt the rationale of othering and provide novel approaches and perspectives—ones that current SCD discourses lack. At these simple, but not simplistic, divergences in perspective between these two practices is where I locate the central point of my argument: sonic fictions provide the necessary appara- tus for a decolonial SCD research and practice. In other words, sonic fictions allow possible designs in which, through sound- and listening-based observations, the questions addressed pertain to the voice of those commonly seen as Other (i.e., the decolonial subject), rather than to those voices of and to whom SCD has been speaking. I am not claiming that every SCD practitioner or researcher interested in sound has to apply sonic fiction as an appropriation or direct translation of its agencies into design language. Rather, I am strongly defending sound-based approaches in SCD as epistemologies for decolonizing design practice. Only by looking at the “untold tales of theory” can we grasp how things can be done differently.52

Decolonizing Speculative Design through Sonic Fiction What decolonial SCD designers can and should do is to effectively design at the earview—to tell stories that orbit around design language but that start, evolve, and end at the ear—and to craft narratives that theorize and produce new knowledge through listening practices.53 To use SCD’s privileged position of generating 51 Dunne, Hertzian Tales, xvii, 71. both knowledge and culture not only as a cogent research method, 52 Schulze, “Adventures in Sonic Fiction: A Heuristic for Sound Studies”. but also as a vector of political action with which its audience can 53 Eshun plays around with the idea of closely relate; to confront political questions through the use of “[r]earview hearing” in More Brilliant auditory discourses. Sonic fiction’s own idiosyncratic language Than the Sun, 78–79, 186, albeit with serves here as an asset for finding new ways of investigating a different meaning. I borrow the term sounds of a future (or futures) yet to come. “earview” from his writings, but my use of it concerns the act of designing while having the the ear (i.e., listening) as a “point of view.”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DESI_a_00381 by guest on 28 September 2021 Topics that pertain to such a practice should focus on systems that are designed through effectively listening—or not listening—to the other. For instance, how is the dialectic tension between your “silence” and my “noise” empowered and reinforced through conscious design decisions? How is the appropriation of sonic space configured? How does estrangement begin and end by defining clear sonic barriers? More than merely observing these questions through SCD’s own methodologies, largely discussed by the so-called “canons” of the discipline, the use of sonic fiction’s premises—that is, extracting generative and speculative theories from sound and its narratives—might contribute to an approach that begins with listening practices rather than with designed objects. Which sounds inhabit these futures? Which sounds might have ceased to reverberate in everyday life, and why? Whose voices might still be speaking, and whose would have been silenced? Sonic fictions allow us to hear previously unheard stories, to modify how we perceive sound and its affects/effects—not only aesthetically, but also politically. Speculative and critical designs allow us to make these stories and sounds tangible, quasi- real, alive, and ready for assessment and experience—hence becoming a strong instrument of the political. Sonic fictions give a helping hand to SCD by offering new ways of depicting futures that ask deep political questions—the ones that relate to sound— and they do so by inviting the decolonial SCD researcher to explore the poetics unveiled by sonic practices and to use them in their design language. I am arguing here for a use of sound-based strategies within design to inquire how power and politics are performed because sound arrives first at the future, and SCD projects should be there to assess from which futures they might be sending signals. Soundscapes change to announce how society modifies itself, and a design practice looking at the future must be listening attentively to them. Listening vocabularies pinpoint unexpected futures told by non-conventional theories, and the voices that are often silenced manifest themselves through oral and aural culture: music, spoken word, listening devices, all waiting to be heard and to be “switched on”—and design has the crucial tools for making that happen.

Acknowledgements This study is funded by the Brazilian Council for Research and Development (CNPq) in cooperation with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The author would like to thank Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Carl DiSalvo, and Jon Oster for their assessment and comments in the development of this article.

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