Noam Youngrak Son ~ Speculated Everything: Speculative Financialization of Design, Self, and Futures

Speculated Everything: Speculative Financialization of Design, Self, and Futures examines the modes of practicing design under financialization, guided by the emblematic case of the popularization of speculative design—a proposal "to use design as a means of speculating how things could be"—in financialized design education and industry. The study highlights the dual meaning of "speculate": speculation on future potentiality, akin to speculative fiction, and financial speculation for surplus value through risk management, distinguished through the semantic capitalization of speculative design and Speculative Design.

The study articulates the hermeneutic process beginning with the financialized understanding of designers' self-identity (financialization of the self), which reorients their sense of possibility and futurity, resulting in financialized visions of the future (financialization of the future). The research critically examines designers' self-identity within these financialized social relations and the financialized view of the future that restricts the potentiality of speculative design practice.

The study demonstrates how various institutions in the design industry facilitate this process. By characterizing attention as capital, a parallel is drawn between the design industry's operations and global capitalism, which functions through financialization, assetization, and extraction. The research characterizes the operation of the assemblage of the design industry creating surplus value of attention through the following process: (a) designers voluntarily incur debt to invest in themselves as assets; (b) accumulation of attention from the audience through the designer's identity as financial assets; (c) designers rely on autobiographies and speculative design to extract resources from multiple outsides of the market of attention capital.