Counterfactual and Alternative Histories as Design Practice by James Auger and Julian Hanna published in Temes de Disseny 39

The version of design that was shaped and perfected during the 20^th Century played a huge role in the making of the modern (global northern) world. Whilst design’s potential as a contributor to the making of worlds is clear, its methods, metrics and purposes have led to a world that is increasingly being revealed as broken and unsustainable. Design today is complicit in the breaking of the world. This essay describes a practice-based design research approach to the making of other worlds. Borrowing from the literary devices of counterfactual or alternative histories and imaginative fiction, as well as an emphasis on extensive historical research, it aims to facilitate the development of new approaches to design that are informed by alternative ideologies, methods and motivations.
As Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the leading creators of alternative fictional worlds, once suggested:

Le Guin explored social and political alternatives in her fiction as well as using her work to cast a critical eye on the status quo. In the context of this essay, Le Guin’s use of the word “civilisation” (as a more specific term than “world”) is particularly helpful when approached from the perspective of Andrew Targowski’s (2004) theory or “grand model” of modern civilisation, the Tri Element Model (Fig. 1).

It is undeniable that design has contributed enormously to improvements in the quality of people’s lives through (amongst other things) the industrial production of domestic goods and the related enhancements of comfort, security and wellbeing. The dominant version of design practised today largely has its origins in the key reforms of the 19^th Century which took place in the United Kingdom under the direction of the Government Schools of Design (founded in 1837). This movement laid the theoretical foundations for numerous designers and artistic enterprises at the end of the 19^th Century and into the early decades of the 20^th Century, including Peter Behrens, the Wiener Werkstätte, and the Bauhaus (Oshinsky 2006).
Design’s contribution to society during this period established its reputation as a force for cultural good and continues to influence how design is perceived and practised today. (One recent example of this continuing thread is the EU-sponsored New European Bauhaus initiative.) A fundamental shift took place in the 1920s, however, that complicated the purpose of designed artefacts. Here the economist and design enthusiast John Heskett (2017) describes some “basic facts about design as a form of practice”:

• The main area in which design is practised is business. There is a tendency for some designers to try to ignore this basic fact of their existence, which is yet another aspect of the problems in giving design credibility, but it will not conveniently disappear.
• As a business activity, design must be judged in terms of contributions to profitability. If it cannot contribute, then it cannot be regarded as of any use in business.

Design has been complicit in the development of business practices since Alfred P. Sloan, the boss of General Motors, came up with a plan to keep people buying new cars. Sloan introduced annual cosmetic design changes to convince car owners to buy replacements each year, essentially inventing the notion of planned obsolescence that is still prevalent today. In his biography he wrote: “The changes in the new model should be so novel and attractive as to create demand … and a certain amount of dissatisfaction with past models as compared with the new one” (Sloan 1990, 265). This historical moment could be viewed as instrumental in cementing design’s role in the development of capitalism and a gradual divergence away from the purer values that were embodied in the design artefacts of the 19^th and early 20^th Century and towards a more conspicuous form of consumption.
In the pursuit of profits, designers have adopted certain problematic modes of practice, approaches towards resources, and processes of evaluation. “Progress dogma” is the fundamental modernist value system: the belief that technological development will inevitably lead to a better future (Auger, Hanna and Encinas 2017). As political theorist Langdon Winner notes:

This belief leads to a system of almost zero self-critique and little room for reflection on the more problematic implications of designed artefacts. In terms of resources, design’s dubious use of materials may be traced back to the colonial era, when raw materials were exchanged for the “precious commodity” of European civilisation (Chandler 2014). Still today, designers focus mainly on the object – its aesthetic qualities and performance – and use whatever materials are necessary to create the most desirable product, regardless of the ethical implications.
Branding, planned obsolescence, and non-repairability all contribute to the negative effects of consumer capitalism. “Future nudge”, or the persistent tendency towards iteration of the existing lineage, limits design to only what the product could conceivably evolve into (Auger, Hanna and Encinas 2017). But are the decisions made many product generations ago still the ideal ones? In fact there is much to suggest the opposite, that systems and products require radical rethinking for our rapidly changing times.
The reduction of possibility happens not only on the object-level but on the level of infrastructure and larger systems and networks as well. Meta-systems like energy infrastructure become invisible, with the designer simply acting within the system. We typically design – and teach students to design – for the system as it is now, without questioning or encouraging students to question how it could or should be. This clear shortcoming in design pedagogy may be remedied using the counterfactual methods outlined in the following sections. First, however, some background is needed to explain the history of counterfactual speculation.

The BBC World Service recently asked listeners worldwide: “Which part of history would you change?” A wide range of crowdsourced counterfactuals (reversing legacies of colonial rule, erasing national borders, even altering influential literary texts) were gathered from respondents, with aims such as reducing inequality, preventing conflict and avoidable tragedies, and so on (BBC 2022). The exercise illustrates both the growing popularity of counterfactual histories and the way in which they represent a safe space for exploring hypothetical alternatives – not to undo the past, but to help us think beyond the narrow pathways we have inherited in order to create better futures.
Counterfactuals have a long and diverse history across many cultures. They often turn on political or military events, such as a different election outcome (Franklin Roosevelt being defeated in 1940 in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America) or the outcome of a war (the victory of the Axis Powers in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle). Sometimes history is “flipped” in a prolonged “what if” thought experiment, as in Malorie Blackman’s novel series Noughts and Crosses (2001- ), in which Europe has been colonised by Africa. They may also serve a pedagogical purpose by revealing the path of a life unloved or unlived, as in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1853) and Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In many fiction plots the device is played for dramatic effect, with ambiguous or negative consequences: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), for example, in which the Black Death kills 99% of Europeans, or Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996), where going back in time to kill Hitler only results in a more competent despot taking his place. H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), as the title suggests, is a positive example: Wells uses the device to sketch a kinder, gentler, thriving world that exists on a parallel timeline in which, among other changes, Jesus Christ was not persecuted and ancient Rome never fell. In an academic design context, counterfactuals in a broader sense have been used as “speculation pumps” to generate constructive thought experiments leading to new outcomes (Oulasvirta and Hornbaek 2022).
Historians especially tend to focus on military "decision points" – a battle lost instead of won, a war avoided instead of launched – at which events could have taken another path (Bernstein 2000). Alternatively, counterfactuals imagine the absence of powerful individuals from specific events to speculate on how things might have played out differently. (In the context of design, for example, this might be something like: what if Steve Jobs never visited Xerox Parc in 1979?¹) From a historian’s perspective, this approach offers rich potential for re-imagining how the world might have evolved under alternative circumstances. Imaginaries based on a poignant counterfactual history can offer thought-provoking insights and perspectives on contemporary life as well as an examination of the past. Since history is “often written by the victors, it tends to ‘crush the unfulfilled potential of the past’, as Walter Benjamin so aptly put it. By giving a voice to the ‘losers’ of history, the counterfactual approach allows for a reversal of perspectives” (Deluermoz and Singaravélou 2021, 49).
Fredric Jameson, also invoking Benjamin, provides a useful summary of the broader “social function” of mainstream speculative fiction, whether in literature, film, or television:

This has, in effect, also been the function of commercially driven narratives and imaginaries around mainstream design, from world fairs to promotional advertisements, which declare in effect: Get ready for the future! In E. L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair (1985), for example, the father describes the way corporate visions are realised as the family leaves the 1939 New York World’s Fair:

As the above passage shows, speculative fiction can also serve a critical or self-reflexive function. Rather than simply selling or packaging or preparing people for “the future” (always singular), speculation can also open up new possibilities and envision alternative futures (always plural) beyond the narrow path of iterative design and the blinkered view of “capitalist realism” (Fisher 2009). It is not limited to the future, either: a rich parallel history of what-if counterfactuals exists in tandem with future-oriented speculations. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1989) famously defined the term “faction” as “imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times” – here instead we are engaging in unreal or parallel or alternative times.
This then is the basic premise, and promise, of counterfactual histories especially as applied to design pedagogy: to break out of constraining lineages and narrow pathways through the imagining of alternative narratives and the application of alternative values. Such speculative proposals “question existing paradigms through the use of different ideologies to those currently directing product development. These are speculations on how things could be, had different choices been made in previous times” (Auger, 2012) (Fig. 2).

Counterfactuals have previously been used under the guise of speculative design. One very early example is Auger-Loizeau’s Iso-phone (2003) (Fig. 3). Developed during the fast-growth period of the mobile telephone, the project imagined an alternative lineage for telecommunication that evolved from Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s famous red British telephone box. Its thick walls and glass acted to dislocate the caller from the noise of the outside world, in turn creating a neutral space that facilitated a focus on the phone conversation. The Iso-phone took this notion several stages further through the use of sensory deprivation theory. The resulting telephone prioritised the quality and immersive nature of the experience and acted to question the increasingly dominant lineage of the always on, always available, always distracted mobile phone experience.

In a more recent example, A New Scottish Enlightenment, Mohammed J. Ali proposed a different outcome to the 1979 Scottish independence referendum (Debatty 2014) (Fig. 4). In Ali’s counterfactual a “yes” vote led to the creation of a new Scottish government whose ultimate goal was the delivery of energy independence for its citizens, paving the way for a future free from fossil fuels. The project was first exhibited three months before the second Scottish independence referendum in September 2014. This starting point (a simple yes or no vote) resonates because it vividly presents to the audience a life that clearly and concretely could have been. The second aspect that gives the project wider relevance is the agenda used to drive extrapolation from its fictional starting point – a simple value shift on energy generation and distribution. By defining citizen energy independence as a national goal, it becomes possible to begin outlining the ways through which this might happen. Other important early examples of a counterfactual approach to design include Sascha Pohflepp’s The Golden Institute and James Chambers’ Attenborough Design Group (see Auger 2012; Dunne and Raby 2013).

Counterfactuals provide an almost surreptitious method of combining design theory with practice. Through a rigorous analysis of history as it relates to a specific subject, the designer can identify the key elements that are problematic when viewed through a contemporary lens of practice. The approach can expose dominant structures of power and the influence these have on design culture and metrics: for example, the pervasive influence of legacy systems and the attention economy, and how they limit the imagination and constrain possibility.
So, how to teach a different version of design? Here are a few key steps that describe a new methodology based on the counterfactual approach. The design brief is structured in the following manner:
• Definition of the theme or subject followed by a broad mapping of its related systems. These can then be examined historically to create a detailed and diverse timeline of the subject – the key moments that led to the current world (for example, a political decision, an invention, a celebrity endorsement, a natural disaster). These can then be critically analysed to identify the event(s) that contributed to the problematic contemporary situation.
• The creation of a counterfactual timeline based on a different outcome of an event identified on the real timeline. One of the key benefits of this approach is the necessity to understand complex histories and how they inform or influence design practice. Experiment with different themes and examine the potential consequences. Remember that the further back in time the more divergent the alternative present will be, and therefore more fictional and complicated to manage – as Ray Bradbury’s classic tale “A Sound of Thunder” illustrates (Bradbury 2005).
• The design of things along the new timeline: hypothetical products, advertising campaigns, images, texts – evidence of the new value system in action. In a longer project this can culminate in well-rendered imaginaries of an alternative present.

We formalised the counterfactuals method further for a workshop at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay. The students comprised a mix of master and PhD candidates in the design research department. This course started with a series of theoretical classes on a critical history of design before moving onto the creation of factual timelines - each chosen by the student to align with their particular interest or focus. Numerous themes emerged including a rethinking of approaches to ageing, based on the elimination of the royalist doctrines of 18^th century France; an alternative history of agriculture, with the tool acting as an intermediary between the person working the soil and their working environment; and an examination of the modalities for a deployment of queer, feminist and trans-feminist archive design forms in everyday life. To conclude this essay, we will describe in more detail, two projects that emerged from the workshop to illustrate the counterfactuals method in action.

Design vs engineering: an automobile counterfactual

Louison Filippi, a 1^st year master student with a background in engineering, decided to approach the counterfactual project through the subject of the automobile. According to J.G. Ballard, the man in the motorcar is the key image of the 20^th Century: 

Ballard’s words from the 1971 short film Crash! (based on his novel) eloquently describe the place of the automobile in 20^th-century culture, making it the perfect subject for a counterfactual project. What if a different set of values had informed the development and evolution of the motorcar over the past 100 years? If it is the vital job of the writer to analyse the significance of these technological dreams, then surely it should be the job of the designer to understand our complicity in their creation and realisation.
The critical point of focus chosen for Filippi’s counterfactual was General Motors’ Alfred P. Sloane’s introduction of annual cosmetic design changes (as discussed in the Introduction). Sloane’s consumerist vision for the future of the car industry became, by extension, a blueprint for the consumer capitalist system we live in today. What if the “shift from a needs to a desires culture”, famously articulated by Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers in the 1920s, never happened? What would the present day automobile look like had it followed instead the value system of General Motors’ competitor Henry Ford, and the purist engineering logic of the Model T?
For the first-year master’s students we use the counterfactual brief to build a foundation for the major second-year project. Filippi is currently in the process of developing the alternative timeline that will ultimately provide opportunities for designing artefacts informed by the alternative value system exemplified by Ford’s approach. Features of the new timeline included a culture of repair and design for optimal repairability, a valuing of durable, handmade objects, (re-)use of existing materials, knock-on effects in adjacent industries such as fashion, and so on.

Automated vs symbiotic: a smart home counterfactual

PhD candidate Valentin Graillat used the counterfactual approach to structure his research into an alternative version of the “smart home”. At the core of his research project is a questioning and re-framing of the word smart and its enduring role in representing imaginaries of (utopian) technological futures.

The genesis of the notion of smart homes can be found in the "Houses of Tomorrow", conceived in the United States during the Cold War by the hegemonic corporations of the time (Disney, Monsanto, General Electric). These glamorous visions of the future, full of jetpacks and robot servants, had the primary role of stimulating the consumption of new domestic appliances (refrigerators, televisions, vacuum cleaners) through the crafting of an alluring spectacle. In the long term, these imaginaries had a secondary performative effect: they conditioned our expectations for the future by positioning as desirable a technologically-driven lifestyle focused on consumption, disengagement, and entertainment. Yesterday's houses of tomorrow crystallised a value system (comfort, efficiency, convenience, distraction) that continues to inform technological research and development today, in spite of deteriorating social conditions and urgent environmental considerations.
In developing the “true” historical timeline, Graillat identified a few key moments that would have provided an opportunity for an alternative present. In 1971 the US reached peak oil production, but in 1973 it was violently shaken by the World Oil Crisis. President Nixon signed the “Independence Project” and intended to initiate a strategic policy to develop domestic energy production. Apart from a few alternative projects that were situated in a rural counterculture, the policy ran out of steam during the decade and was replaced by a re-investment in import policies at the end of the 1970s. Graillat asks: what if the American government had reinforced investment on domestic energy production, requisitioning large companies such as Honeywell to develop domestic technologies, and allowing citizens to produce bio-energy in an urbanised context?
The technological realisation of the smart home, which began in the mid-1980s, would then have radically integrated alternative research such as that of the Farallones Institute in Berkeley, whose objective was to develop appropriate technologies (e.g. using biogas) in the domestic field. With support from the large companies that dominated the technological sector at the time, a different version of smart would have emerged - less sensor/computation and more aligned with natural systems and habitats. Graillat’s project speculates that the domestic technologies developed in this context would have allowed the inhabitants of residential and urban areas to produce energy on a domestic scale through co-existing with living organisms present in their environment.

One unexpected result of the workshop was the counterfactual timeline as an approach to the archive. The writer of historical fiction, Hilary Mantel, made some poetic observations on the paucity of our recorded history during her Reith series of lectures (2017):

With its focus on underrepresented groups, unrealised possibilities, and knock-on effects for the present and future, a theme that deserves further exploration is Dylan Fluzin’s (Master 1) queer archive or “un-archive”; this adds another factor that separates history from the past. As Karen Barad has argued, “the past is never closed, never finished once and for all” (Barad 2010, 264). Therefore it is fruitful to challenge “rhetorical forms that presume actors move along trajectories across a stage of spacetime (often called history)” (240). “Queering time” – bending the straight line of technological progress, questioning causality and linearity, and countering hegemonic conceptions of time (such as traditional archival practices) in order to open up new possibilities and discover alternative realities – is one way to constructively deploy counterfactual histories in design education.
We began this essay with a discussion of design’s last key reformation. That reformation was necessary due to the dramatic cultural upheaval taking place during the Industrial Revolution, and it secured design’s role as a mediator between technological progress and its manifestation in the contexts of everyday life. Design is now in dire need of a new reformation – its methods, and more importantly its values, are badly out of date. The additive approach to technological change, championed by governments and corporations alike, will not provide the dramatic shifts that are necessary. Design’s history – predominantly white, male, Western, and so on – enforces a very narrow scope of possibility of what and who is celebrated, and by extension what and who has the power to determine “future histories” (to borrow another term from speculative fiction).
This history also dictates a narrowed scope in terms of how designed artefacts are evaluated. To take an obvious example, Dieter Rams’ (1976) spare, functional ten principles of “good design” occupy an outsized influence as a metric for the evaluation of all contemporary designed artefacts. Here perhaps is the most vital use of counterfactuals in design, and their most valuable contribution to design education: to allow different paths to emerge that were drowned out by the dominant or “standard” narrative(s). Conjuring into being or simply recognising alternative histories can open up valuable future paths, and create space for rich new possibilities and new imaginaries to flourish.