Interesting essay at Asterisk on the familiar O’Neill orbital habitat designs, and how and why they were created.
… funding [O’Neill’s] Space Settlements made a kind of sense. NASA needed only a token sum to pay visiting academics for a few weeks, and in return it got an environmentally resonant shuttle destination that fit the Limits to Growth narrative that stressed overpopulation. The study was a low-cost hedge that let NASA claim it was thinking beyond near‑Earth trucking without committing a dollar more than the logic of austerity would allow. There were few downsides, so long as the work didn’t stray too far from its proper context.
But stray far it did.
Two things leapt out at me here. The first is that, weirdly enough, NASA project budget design works much the same way as arts funding budget design works in Sweden, albeit for table stakes that differ by multiple orders of magnitude. In both cases, you go in knowing that you have zero chance of actually getting what you ask for, so you learn to build projects and project clusters with vast sacrificial zones that can be strategically thrown under the bus when the word comes back that you can have, say, 40% of what you asked for.
(Why not just ask for 40% in the first place? Because then you would appear lacking in ambition, of course! In both of these cases, as well as in academia, the largely unexamined question is how much of each year’s funding goes on developing project plans and budgets that literally everyone involved knows will be kicked to the curb. The sheer waste and stupidity of this approach is a great illustration of David Graeber’s argument in The Utopia of Rules that, for all that almost everyone in government complains about “bureaucracy”, regardless of party affiliation, almost everything that happens at the level of nation states and institutions—and indeed further down the scale—indicates very clearly that everyone in government is profoundly committed to bureaucracy, and that almost every measure introduced to “create savings” and “remove red tape” actually results in the hiring of more and more people for essentially bureaucratic roles. You can see how he came to the Bullshit Jobs hypothesis, can’t you?)
The second thing is that O’Neill’s habitats are well worth thinking about from the perspective of design fiction.
They’re clearly prototypes, and—as the linked article suggests—they were seen as almost entirely speculative by their commissioners, if not their creators. While what we now call “design fiction” tends to lean much harder into what I think of as the “trial balloon” aspect of the practice—prototypes as provocations, rather than prototypes as proposals—there is nonetheless an undeniable rhetorical component to O’Neill’s work: those habitats were a sketch toward an engineering solution to life in space, yes, but they were also (perhaps somewhat unwittingly) a sketch of the civilisational context in which human life in space might end up being a thing. O’Neill intended to propose settlements, but in so doing he proposed a whole future.
More concisely, then: when you design a thing, you imply the world in which it exists. Design is always worldbuilding—even when the designer doesn’t think that’s what they’re doing. Perhaps then more than ever.
I’m particularly interested in Law’s description of O’Neill’s prototypes as “escaping their context”, because it gets at something that’s been nagging at me about design fiction (and related speculative/worldbuild-y practices) for ages: they always come with a frame.
To some extent, the frame is the only thing that differentiates regular design from design fiction, and the anecdote of O’Neill’s work shows that clearly. The orbital habitat sketches were capable of doing a certain job, namely demonstrating ambition within the constraints of the prevailing budgetary restrictions, but only if presented as such. Presented without that context, however—which is to say, without a clear frame saying “we’re not proposing to actually do any of this any time soon, just looking at the possibilities”—they look like a serious proposal, because the magic of design is precisely to propose.
This all goes back, for me, to Bruce Sterling’s clear statement over a decade ago that design fiction must not be hoaxy: that is has “an audience, not victims”. The reason this matters is because the potential hoaxiness is exactly where the power of the form comes from: it’s the power to propose or to provoke.
But the orientation of that power toward proposition or provocation—I might even say its valence—is controlled by the context. Taken out of context, it becomes a floating signifier, and gets fitted into whatever narratives people already have going on. O’Neill’s habitats, when taken out of context as serious propositional designs, fitted neatly into a narrative of a profligate NASA held by people who wanted an excuse to spend less money on that sort of thing.
But the whole reason Law managed to sell this essay is because those very same decontextualised orbital habitats fitted neatly into another narrative, namely the one in which human beings expanded their way up the gravity well into a new frontier of opportunity. This was not intended as a hoax, but with hindsight it might reasonably be described as a sort of deception nonetheless: O’Neill designed a memorable and enduring element of what I call The Future, and indeed his habitats are mentioned (alongside the inevitable jetpacks) among Graeber’s examples of dreams long since foreclosed upon by “bureaucracy”. The question of their possibility or practicality is less relevant than their capacity to inspire a certain sort of wonder.
The context of a work of design tells the viewer something about the world that the design implies, and signals how seriously it should be taken. In the absence of a controlling context, however—or in the presence of a deliberately permissive one—the vacuum of the world implied by the designed thing beckons to the viewer, inviting them to fill it with inferences of their own.
A proposal can be taken as a provocation. A provocation can be taken as a proposal. You can even push an audience toward one or another of those reading positions by a deft (re)framing.
The valence of a prototype is not inherent to the prototype; it is entirely a function of its context.
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