Experimental Realism: the BOOK
“Speculative design surrounds us at an ever-increasing pace and in ever more impactful ways. As such, it has never been more important to study its ecology and embed its principles into the education system via a responsive and responsible teaching methodology: experimental realism.”
— Gem Barton, author
Published by RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Publishing (May 2022) this is part of the “Design Studio” series aimed specifically at students and academics operating within the fields of architecture and its wider territories.
Contributors: Liam Young (Sci-Arc), Dunne & Raby (The New School, NY), Anab Jain (Superflux), Phil Balagtas (Design Futures Initiative), Matt Ward (Goldsmiths University), Kathy Nothstine F9uture Cities, NESTA), N. Koller, T. Greenall, M.Mastrandrea (Royal College of Art), B.Bratton & N.Boyadjiev (Strelka Institute), E.Baraona Pohl & C.Reyes (Future Architecture Platform), Dana Barale Burdman, Anna Pompermaier, Ayesha Silburn, Phoebe Walton.
Special advisors: Radha Mistry (Arup Foresight), Lonny Avi Brooks (California State University), Monika Bielskyte (Protopia Futures), Meike Schalk (KTH School of Architecture), Aarathi Krishnan (United Nations Development Programme), Jason Tester (Queer the Future).
“The term ‘experimental realism’ has previously been reserved for the field of social psychology – ‘the extent to which situations created in social psychology experiments are real and impactful to participants’, but as pedagogy ‘experimental realism’ sees the experimental (adjective) as a method of testing, as well relating to something new and untried and sees realism (noun) as both a practical understanding of life and/or a simulation.”
— Gem Barton, author
Except from the Editors Introduction:
The premise
The built environment is an expression of society’s successes and misgivings, of its needs and wants, of its ideals and principles. As these things morph, so do spatial qualities – and this is where we are embedded, as architects and designers, in the possibility of this transformation.
To engage in the criticality of speculation as theory and practice is to seek to answer deeper questions and become more familiar with the possibilities for the future. Do not be mistaken, speculation is not about prediction; it is about understanding the plural potential of the possible, the probable and the plausible. This critical thought has real-world applications and gives rise to transferable skills in relation to employability and social contribution, beyond the academy and the entertainment industry to privately funded research thinktanks (such as Google X), NGOs, innovation centres, government departments for foresight and innovation, and so on.
Pedagogy and practice
This volume of the Design Studio series helps us prepare for unknown unknowns, by sharing the speculative design methodologies employed within creative education (specifically, the architecture design studios and design courses in higher education) to critically study spatial design fictions and futures. Different cultures, institutions and individual academics, over many decades, have organically or indeed intentionally developed teaching methodologies to help lead their students to critical questions about the design of our future built environment.
Experimental Realism as pedagogy embraces the speculative, the unreal and the theatrical, with no pressure for its outputs to exist in the concrete world – but it also goes beyond this, to adopt and value the processes of narrative and storytelling, personification and characterisation. It can be described as facilitating students through speculative spatial design projects to question, test and simulate the ways in which our physical, emotional, societal and intellectual behaviours could change in the future. It looks at the multiplicity of ways in which that impacts the ecologies of spatial design practice.