Speculative design and Indian Mythology a correlation
When we think of speculative design, it feels like a field with a huge halo around it. It seems like a fantasy land where no one has ever been into and land which promises a world beyond our world. So when I started thinking on this topic the first thing that struck me was the stories that I had heard from my grandmother. Stories that were very much Indian and had a deep connection with Indian culture. Stories that we think as future must have been narrated as mythological stories some time back- perhaps did our ancestors really live them? Yes maybe -one has to believe that things did exist a few thousand years back. The speculative design has a deep correlation with Indian Mythological stories!!
The speculative design framework was established by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby and has been elaborated quite extensively in their book “Speculative Everything”.As they describe and write there are many kinds of imagination, dark imaginations, original imaginations, social, creative, mathematical. There are also professional imaginations — the scientific imagination, the technological imagination, the artistic imagination, the sociological imagination, and of course the one we are most interested in, the design imagination.
So when we look speculative design more from a Mythological or social imagination point of view things start unfolding in a very different way. To make things a little simpler I plotted them in four quadrants and then plotted things more from their impact perspective. Past- Past was the quadrant that took me to the Ramayana and Mahabharat Era. An era that dated back to 5000 years BC. The past future was a nearby quadrant of 50 to 100 years where television serials like “Star Trek” played a profound impact in the way visualized scientific things. A quadrant of Past Further was predominated by Design and more of social design changes. And then moving to the forth quadrant takes us to the ear of Huperloops, Drone technology, and a completely technology-dominated quadrant.
My focus was to see these correlations. I tried to see some examples from mythological stories and see how they map in today's context.
In Mahabharat, we find evidence of Sanjay who narrated the story of the war as it was happening in real-time to his King Dhrutashtra who was blind but wanted live updates of the war in real-time. We few years got the invention of live moving pictures or the television as we call it today. Now even today we experience Live telecasts on many channels.
Indian mythology had a god whose name is Chitragupta. He is the God who keeps a log trail of all the things every single human does on earth and when he or she dies Chitragupta presents a snapshot of all things the person did in his lifetime. It's impossible to see a timescale at a glance and so it means he had some Dashboard as we call it today. We also have big data and dashboarding concepts in today's era.
Indian stories depicted the concept of teleporting. A concept which we also saw in the fiction series ‘Star Trek’ which showed the concept of the team easily moving from one planet to another using a teleporting system. India God Narada had the ability to move freely between Swarga Lok, Prithvi Lok, and Patal Lok.
There are multiple such correlations we can see and its fun to gather such evidence. It's very interesting to see how can we use these mythological stories and find inspirations for today's world. Maysabha in Mahabharat was one such illusional architecture which if we see can be something similar to the holographic projection. Visual illusions stories we read are close to the digital Led walls which can be seen in today's context. This is an interesting area of study from design and designers context and I am sure even you would love to explore reading things even further. For more details on this, you can refer to my slide share presentation or hear the video as seen below. I hope you like this fascinating world of mythology and speculative design.
References
Slide Deck by Anirudh Natuu
Presentation deck of the slides used for the video
Reference Material and links
Speculative design Projects that will blow your mind
Reference Videos
Speculative Design and the Future of UI — J.Paul Neeley
Speculative design | Cat Drew | Nesta Sparks
Conclusion
Acceptable to visualize and talk about a completely fictional world has been there for centuries. It's only that when we move the time clock back to a few thousand years they feel like mythological stories and we feel that that was a completely different world. Visualization has been a great power to see the future and as they say, we live things twice — once in our dreams and the second time when these dreams become a reality. As a matter its very interesting to study how these stories of the past can perhaps become the reality of our future. A world which we dream of which exists on Mars and Moon and galaxies away may perhaps become a reality in the few hundred years to come.
Disclaimer -The images used in this presentation are for representation purposes and have been used in academic interest to establish the correlations and are property of the original creators. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to my current employer, organization, committee, or other group or individual.
