Design methods need to reconsider ways to avoid othering messiness (or what appears to be contradictory or nonsensical) within wicked problem situations, particularly crisis sites. As such, this paper suggests that play frames (defined as Fun Machines) can be utilised as situated strategies that designers can apply to address paradoxes and contradictions. The paper presents the theoretical framework for a Fun Machine by focusing on second-generation design methods and how they facilitate conversation, while simultaneously exploring an often-neglected playful aspect of conversation that is usually found in fun-making. The applications of a Fun Machine are discussed in the historical context (Cedric Price’s Fun Palace) and with a pilot project conducted at a contemporary crisis site (Dessau).

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This paper critically reflects on the problematic relationship between design innovation and design defuturing. Design innovation is broadly understood as a field of knowledge, a mode of organising research around design and a form of design practice linked to dominant and colonising fictions of technology and progress. Design defuturing foregrounds the complex dialectical relation between creation and destruction, emphasising that every form of design futuring also acts to erase other futures. Design innovation has been one of the primary ways “defuturing” agendas gained operative (political) power historically and in the present. So situated, design innovation is structurally elemental to, and circumscribed by, its subordination to the economy and culture of “acceleration.” Several critiques of innovation that emerge from within the systemic thinking discourse do well in engaging the questions of knowledge and learning. However, these systemic readings remain relatively underdeveloped in terms of their politics, failing to consider the ontological propensity of what gets brought into being as it either futures or defutures. By looking at three broader fictions of innovation of the U.S., China, and Cuba in relation to the question of defuturing, we question the fictions that connect design innovation to reductionist accounts of progress. We also propose a framework in which “fictioning” (second-order) can enable a way of speculating upon “contra-innovation,” i.e., innovation to counter innovation that defutures. So positioned, contra-innovation undercuts the notion of innovation posited with an affirmative value and exposes it as a contested domain of action.