Innovation through refusal: resisting the speed trap

In a 2010 interview with Vice magazine, Paul Virilio described the experience of speed perceived in a car as follows:

“We can see that physical speed, of movement, freezes you. You are inert, delateralized. And there’s a phenomenon of hypnopie. The faster you go, the further your gaze must project, and you lose lateralization. In other words, you are fascinated.”

Virilio uses a simple image: when you drive fast, you must look far. If you fix on the road just in front of your hood, you crash. Your vision must anticipate, project itself 200 meters, 500 meters ahead.

But.

If you look ONLY far, you miss the immediate dangers. The pedestrian who emerges, the pothole, the truck that brakes. Your peripheral vision must stay active, your attention must be able to switch instantly from distant to near.

As the great theorist of dromology, Paul Virilio was already observing decades ago phenomena that are still present, that have ultimately only amplified, and that today sometimes give the impression that “He who goes faster eats he who reflects.”

We are by definition an “innovation” studio, therefore, we sell acceleration. It’s our job. We imagine, design and develop the products dreamed by our clients. Our starting point often nests in the imaginary and our mission is to create a bridge toward the real in order to give form, to translate these dreams into a language now almost constantly understood through the “marketable” prism.

A client arrives with their dream; or unfortunately more often with a problem, we deliver a prototype in six weeks. Fast iteration, fail fast, optimized time-to-market. All the vocabulary of speed that traps us in a form of fascination Virilio spoke of, that can freeze us in a trajectory at any moment. Tunnel vision.

So how do we avoid crashing?

The question is not rhetorical. It structures our daily practice, and probably that of any studio that refuses to become a simple executor of preformatted briefs, condemned to being high-level service providers who decorate capitalist acceleration with pretty design thinking.

There exists a tension, named, theorized, between two ways of conceiving innovation. Two temporalities. Two types of gaze.

On one side, speculative design. On the other, pragmatic development.

These terms are not fixed, not yet stabilized in a clear theoretical corpus. We borrow them, twist them, adjust them to our workshop reality. What follows is not a doctrine, rather an attempt to name what’s at stake when we try to conceive without being hypnotized by delivery speed alone.

Because in an innovation studio’s practice, this fascination takes this precise form: the obsession with the deliverable. The prototype that pops. The concept that sells. The marketable product by deadline.

Speculative design then allows us to look far, anticipate mutations, question the brief’s evidences. Necessarily, this implies looking 3-5-10 years ahead, at minimum. Scanning trends, cultural mutations, weak signals.

Speculation allows us to tell our clients: “What you’re asking for is coherent with 2023. But 2026 will look like this. Do you want us to design for yesterday or for tomorrow?” The risk however is very real: staying in pure speculation. Magnificent concepts, intellectual provocations, but zero production. A speculative future that never materializes becomes academic, disconnected.

Pragmatic development meanwhile allows us to look close, manage material constraints, deliver what can exist today and coincides with tangible realities. Pragmatic development is the engineer saying: “OK but with what components?” The sales person reminding: “The client has 80k budget, not 300k.” The project manager alerting: “If we add this layer, we exceed by 6 weeks.”

These constraints are obviously not always brakes, they’re also guardrails.

Without them, we’d produce splendid concepts that don’t materialize, that cost too much, that arrive too late, or that serve no one.

Pragmatism forces incarnation. It obliges speculation to descend from the sky of ideas to negotiate with matter: available electronic components, stable software frameworks, real budgets, contractual deadlines, the team’s skills.

However, contrary to speculative design, the risk here is killing all ambition. Finding ourselves delivering “what’s possible” rather than “what’s necessary.” Optimizing the existing instead of proposing the unprecedented. Becoming an elegant technical service provider but conceptually dead.

The balance is delicate: one must not choose between speculation and pragmatism. One must hold them together in tension.

Our strategic process follows this logic:

Assumed speculation → Material confrontation → Incarnated synthesis.

We build concepts that keep speculation’s ambition but accept pragmatism’s constraints.

• Should we give the client what they ask for (pragmatic) or what they need without knowing it yet (speculative)?

• Should we maximize the team’s pride in our concepts (speculative) or the serenity of delivery (pragmatic)?

• Should we respond to markets’ current demand (pragmatic) or anticipate emerging demand (speculative)?

• Should we optimize the user’s immediate comfort (pragmatic) or preserve their long-term autonomy and security (speculative)?

There is no stable answer. These balances are renegotiated project by project, week by week, sometimes hour by hour.

And perhaps that’s exactly it, the exit from hypnopie: accepting that there is no fixed trajectory. That each project imposes recalibrating the gaze. That speed is not the problem itself, but the inability to modulate, to slow down when necessary, to deviate when the crash becomes inevitable.

Virilio wasn’t proposing to renounce the car. He was proposing to understand what it does to our perception. To make visible the fascination that freezes us.

He said: ‘To invent the airplane is to invent the plane crash. To invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck.’

Each technology invents its specific accident and that’s the whole dilemma of the modern world.

And today, the accident has become the model.

The structures that dominate technological innovation reward exactly this fascination: move fast and break things, fail fast, disrupt or die. Speed is no longer a means, it has become the end. He who goes faster wins, independently of what he destroys on the sides.

It’s not a question of personalities. It’s a question of system that valorizes acceleration, disruption, rapid value extraction. It produces actors who optimize for speed because that’s what guarantees them survival and domination.

We refuse this logic.

Not because we would be more virtuous. But because we see the crashes around us. Projects that destroy their users’ attention to optimize engagement. Devices that capture data without real consent. Innovations that accelerate work to exhaustion.

We don’t claim to have a miracle solution. We don’t say “technology in service of humans” as if it were an evidence sufficient to proclaim.

We say: there exists a tension between speed and consciousness. And it is possible to work this tension rather than deny it. To deliver without being hypnotized.

It’s difficult. It’s unstable. It doesn’t resolve anything definitively.

But at least, it refuses the fascination. It keeps open the possibility to say no.

To slow down.

To deviate before the crash.