If you can correctly identify a problem, it's already a historical condition.

Going beyond solutions, we have to envision the potential beauty of our design implications, how spaces will evolve and react to the environment over time. Speculative design should be an instigator, raising questions and creating a mirror-world to aid our thinking, an alternate reality that continues to influence our own.

We consider it part of an architect’s responsibility to look past the current projects towards the future of the built environment.

The earliest stages of design are contemplation of larger social and environmental problems. Going beyond solutions, we have to envision the potential beauty of the complications of our solutions, how they will evolve and react to the unknown. What if we introduced the unknown as a basic fact at the beginning, a precondition? Randomness or intuition can bring seemingly unrelated design ideas into architectural “visioning”. This is a natural concept to anyone who has studied creativity and cognition.

We don’t know the future. If we propose a solution to a social or environmental problem, we are accepting that problem as a fixed condition, disregarding unpredictability. Our solution will address an historical condition resulting in an exercise that becomes immediately obsolete, an instant relic of our time–and perhaps hubris.

Only by moving forward with creative vision can we positively integrate design in the future. Promoting awareness only goes so far–It is ineffective in creating action. Design should be the instigator, raising questions, creating a mirror-world to aid our thinking, an alternate reality.