Our project questions the human-imposed, capitalist-driven designs around us. Coming from 3 different parts of the world – India, Malaysia, the US – we see the same pattern happening across the contexts we grew up in, to the places we call home. The way humans live and relate to each other and to our world is not sustainable.
The Terible Ideas Network is a centuries-old network that aims to bust these ‘terrible’ designs around us through bio-speculative un-designing. Through performing speculative fabulation, we critique and reorient our ways of being and relating to the world, inviting others into critical dialogue and a movement of collective bio-speculative un-designing.
Team-
Parth Patel
Cherilyn Tan
Gretel Dougherty
Finalist for Science Sandbox Prize, Biodesign Challenge 2024
The sketches have been at the core of thinking for this project. Some of the explorations were about the familiar ideas considered to be speculative-
What if plants had a prosthetics leaf like humans have limb?
What would electronics look like if drawn from a bio prospect?
What would a rube goldberg machine for different organisms look like? we were trying to approach the idea highlighting all of the nature has different timelines and perception of time. What if we combine that as a chain reaction?
The sketches initially were convincing to us but more we repeated the process, we sort of understood this about every idea that we would draw, eventually would indicate as a terrible idea. An overfamiliar way to looking at our future from a so called ‘Bio design perspective’.
We did not aim to create solutions; we initiated dialogue and called for a profound mindset shift.
By challenging norms, groupthink, and unconscious cognition, we questioned capitalism and consumerism, exploring alternatives through the lens of speculative and discursive design. Human industry, driven by the flawed logic of perpetual design to counter design, had devastated ecosystems and proliferated harm across social, political, and cultural dimensions. This global pattern—from palm oil plantations to monoculture—revealed a deeper complicity in short-term, human-centered thinking that ignored the Earth’s vast timeline. Building on speculative precedents, we critiqued through satire, performed capitalism itself, and exposed the paradox of designing within a capitalist frame. Even well-intentioned designs, like a “lawn destroyer,” were trapped in cycles of profitization and consumerism, underscoring the futility of tailoring solutions to human wants while perpetuating harm. By highlighting the irony of the “terrible ideas network,” we confronted the inescapable entanglement of design, destruction, and complicity in systems we sought to dismantle.
Even though the visuals are so objective in nature, we were as a group never concerned about the form of it. As mentioned previously the critique was to highlight how we use different functions as selling points driving the capitalistic nature of our markets. The form represented these qualities through contextualizing the functions of a lawn destroyer.
How will it move?
Can it sustain on its own? Where does it get its energy from?
Can it involve artificial intelligence?
These are few of the questions which sounded so over familiar to the design process that we were interested in using them as standpoints to highlights the instructive characters of design.