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The concept of "Design as Participation" is rooted in the idea that design is not just about creating artefacts or solutions but actively involving people in the design process. This approach emphasises collaboration, inclusivity, and the recognition that design outcomes are shaped by the contributions of various stakeholders, including end-users.

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This started with a drivetime conversation about contemporary design with Joi Ito. We were stuck in traffic, and in our conversation, a question emerged about designers: This new generation of designers that work with complex adaptive systems. Why are they so much more humble than their predecessors who designed, you know, stuff?12

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Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

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References

1. Bemelmans, Th. (ed.) (1984): Beyond Productivity: Information Systems Development for Organizational Effectiveness. In Proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference. Minneapolis, Minnesota: North Holland.

2. Bødker, S. (1996): Creating Conditions for Participation: Conflicts and Ressources in Systems Development. Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 215-236.

3. Clement, A. and P. Van den Besselar (1993): A Retrospective Look at PD Projects. In M. Muller and S. Kuhn (eds.): Participatory Design: Special Issue of the Communications of the ACM, vol. 36, no.4, pp. 29-39.

4. Ehn, P. and Å. Sanberg (1979): Management Control and Wage Earner Power (Foretagsstyrning och Lontagarmakt). Falkoping: Prisma.

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5. Greenbaum, J. (1996): Back to Labor: Returning to Labor Process Discussions in the Study of Work. Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

6. Gärtner, J. (1998): Participatory Design in Consulting, Computer Supported Cooperative Work - A Journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 7, nos.3-4.

7. Kensing, F. (1983): The Trade Unions Influence on Technological Change. In U. Briefs et al. (eds.): Systems Design For, With and By the Users. North Holland.

8. Kensing, F. (1987): Generation of Visions in Systems Development - A Supplement to the Toolbox. In P. Docherty et al. (eds.): Systems Design for Human Development and Productivity: Participation and Beyond. Springer Verlag.

9. Kensing, F., J. Simonsen and K. Bødker (1998): Participatory Design at a Radio Station. Computer Supported Cooperative Work - A Journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 7, nos.3-4.

10. Kensing, F., J. Simonsen and K. Bødker (forthcoming): MUST - A Method for Participatory Design. Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum.

11. Korpela, M., H. A., Soriyan, K. C. Olufokunbi, A. A. Onayade, A. Davies-Adetugbo and D. Adesanmi (1998): Community Participation in Health Informatics in Africa: An Experiment in Tripartite Partnership in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Computer Supported Cooperative Work - A Journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 7, nos.3-4.

12. Mambrey, P., G. Mark and U. Pankoke-Babatz (1998): User Advocacy in Participatory Design: Designers' Experiences with a New Communication Channel. Computer Supported Cooperative Work - A Journal of Collaborative Computing. Kluwer Academic Publishers, vol. 7, nos.3-4.

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Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns - Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

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We characterize Participatory Design (PD) as a maturing area of research and as an evolving practice among design professionals. Although PD has been applied outside of technology design, here we focus on PD in relation to the introduction of computer-based systems at work.

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Speculative design is a design method addressing big societal problems and looking towards the future—and creating products and services for those scenarios. Speculative design is the process of addressing big societal issues with design processes and systems.

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According to 'Speculative Everything: Design, Dreaming, and Social Dreaming.'

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According to 'Speculative Everything: Design, Dreaming, and Social Dreaming.'

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“[Speculative design] thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”

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Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby: Founders of the concept, known for their book "Speculative Everything" which is pivotal in the field.

James Auger: Notable for his work on speculative design and its applications in everyday life.

Julian Bleecker: Known for his blog post "Design Fiction", which is influential in the field.

Bruce Sterling: Science fiction author and design theorist, known for his work on design fictions.

Paola Antonelli: Senior curator at MoMA, known for her work on design and its social implications.

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Exploring Futures of Learning through Speculative Design

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I have been drawn to the area of education and learning, out of both frustration with the current formal structures and curiosity in…

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A designer (essentially) has three jobs:

1. Create

2. Solve problems with what they create

3. Resist the urge to scream when a client says "Can you make it pop?" for the millionth time.

But there are often problems so big that it becomes difficult-if not impossible-to create solutions for them. Issues like financial crises, environmental disasters, and political strife aren't things you can simply sit down and design solutions for...right?

Meet speculative design.

Speculative design is a design method addressing big societal problems and looking towards the future-and creating products and services for those scenarios. BUT, like all things design, the concept is a little more complex than it sounds.

Let's take a look at speculative design, its genesis, and some great examples of how it works.

What is speculative design?

Speculative design is the process of addressing big societal issues with design processes and systems.

The term was coined by Anthony Dunne, professor and head of the design interactions programme at the Royal College of Art, and Fiona Raby, professor of industrial design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The two popularized the concept in their book, Speculative Everything: Design, Dreaming, and Social Dreaming.

From the book:

"[Speculative design] thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people's imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality."

According to Dunne and Raby, designers shouldn't just address issues of today, but also take a look into the future and ask, "How can we address future challenges with design?"

Where typical design takes a look at small issues, speculative design broadens the scope and tries to tackle the biggest issues in society. It seeks to answer questions like:

How should design impact the entire world?

How can we design for a healthier ecosystem?

What can we do to influence future cultures?

How can future technologies impact our products and services-and vice versa?

What don't we want to see from the future?

Speculative design tries to imagine what it would be like to design without the current limitations of technology, culture, and politics in mind.

It's important to note that what we aren't talking about here is predicting the future. As Raby and Dunne note in the book, those who try to predict the future often end up dead wrong.

Instead, speculative design aims to imagine all the possible futures that could be. To do so, the book presents a taxonomy of possible futures.

These futures can be probable, plausible, probable, and preferable. Any good piece of speculative design should fall within one of these areas. These possible futures are lenses used to better understand the present, and what we want and don't want to see in our future as a society.

Anything outside of these futures is in the realm of fantasy-something speculative design has no interest in exploring. Rather, they want to see what can be created and explore society's relationship with that creation.

The benefits of speculative design

As tech progress lurches forward, businesses and brands need to make sure they're in the best spot to adapt and grow with those advancements. This means innovating in whatever industry they might be in, which positions them to gain a large swath of future markets. Most tech markets, after all, are winner-take-all.

This isn't an abstraction, either. Organizations like Visa, Pepsi, Ford, and even NATO have begun hiring science fiction writers to help them create more innovative products and strategies. They all recognize the importance of being ahead of the game in terms of technology and services.

And when coupled with more concrete design practices, speculative design can be an incredibly useful tool for businesses and even governments.

For example, in 2015, the UK Government's Office for Science partnered with Strange Telemetry, a research consultancy that leverages speculative design, in order to explore the " challenges and opportunities of an aging society."

The way it worked was simple: Strange Telemetry came up with various concepts and prototypes for potential future scenarios and then asked participants what their reactions were to the concepts. This exercise gave policymakers a greater idea on what their constituents wanted-and didn't want-out of future policies and technologies.

(For a full break down of the study, be sure to check out the full report here.)

Problems with speculative design

While speculative design offers plenty of opportunity for designers to push creatively, it does have a few drawbacks-namely, how difficult it is to sell.

Since speculative design is about taking risks and pushing the boundaries of what can be designed, companies and businesses are less likely to invest in them. This limits designers from being able to take those bold choices since there's not a lot of businesses willing to fund these projects

And according to Dunne and Raby, there have been three key changes that have occurred throughout history that have rendered speculative design "more difficult and less likely" to exist.

Market forces. Beginning in the 1980s, design began to become more and more commercialized. Speculative design and their designers were "seen as out of sync with design's potential to generate wealth." Design became a tool to make more money rather than an artform and means of social change.

Atomization. According to Speculative Everything, society has grown more atomized, with a greater emphasis on individual accomplishments and actions rather than those for communities as a whole. There's less of a demand for design that addresses bigger societal issues.

Pessimism. The dreams of the 20th century have been "downgraded" to hopes, according to Raby and Dunne. With broader issues such as climate change and financial disaster coming into focus, younger generations have adopted a more pessimistic attitude about the future. After all, why plan for something that might not happen?

Jeez, that's darker than my morning coffee. Here's a palate cleanser.

Ah, much better. Now where were we?

The key changes in the economic and design world have drastically limited the ability of designers as a whole to take part in speculative design.

It's simple economics: If there's no demand for it, there's not an obvious reason to supply it. That means the type of things designers are allowed to create is limited by the bottom line. Since speculative design is about disruption and creating ideas around things that might not exist yet, it is looked upon warily by businesses who don't want to take a risk on bolder ideas.

But does that mean that you should ignore speculative design completely?

3 great examples of speculative design

To give you a better picture of speculative design in action, let's take a look at three examples.

They range from the familiar to the delightfully weird-but in all, they give you a good idea of what speculative design is and its implications in society.

1. Star Trek

Outside of fighting Klingons and going where no man had gone before, the show was chock-full of ideas and concepts that have had a deep influence on tech designs today.

Each episode showed millions of viewers what could be possible with technology like tablets ...

... cell phones ...

... teleconferences ...

... and much more!

NASA scientists have even gone on record saying how much of an influence the show was for their research.

And while we might be a few years away from tractor beams and laser cannons, we can anticipate those technologies with speculative design.

2. The iPhone

In 2007, Apple announced the creation of the iPhone, and with it, they showcased the power of speculative design on a grand scale.

When the iPhone was introduced there was nothing like it on the market, so Apple's design team had to develop an entire UI/UX process from scratch. That means answering questions like:

What impact will this interface have on future users?

How will this impact future tech?

What is the user flow / journey going to look like?

How often are users going to shatter their screen after dropping their phones on barroom floors? (Okay, maybe not this one)

The result was a piece of technology that completely upended the mobile phone market and changed the way everyone interacts with their phones.

Apple looked beyond what most thought was possible with mobile devices and crafted a vision around that. In doing so, they relied on speculative design to create a completely new and innovative product-and to great success.

4. The ten-thousand year question

Designers know how to design for products and services for present day customers. They can even broaden that scope and design for people a few years, or maybe even a few decades down the line.

But there are some things that need to be designed across entire millennia.

That's the issue designers and scientists are grappling with as they figure out how to handle the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico-the United State's only underground radioactive waste repository.

Nuclear waste is dangerous and life-threatening if we come into close contact with it. As such, scientists need to figure out how to develop systems for future societies and cultures to recognize the danger of the WIPP and the deadly radiation within it.

Surely, it should be as simple as slapping a few skull and crossbones or biohazard symbols around the area ... right?

Not if you consider the fact that the WIPP will remain dangerous to human lives for 10,000 years. That's more than enough time for language, culture, and societies to evolve.

We have no idea what human life will look like at that time. They'll likely have new cultures, systems, and languages. Symbols and signs of today will likely look like gibberish to them.

So how do you design a warning system for people that far into the future? A few designs proposed:

Creating a pseudo-religious organization to pass down stories and traditions to avoid the area

Developing cats that glow when close to radiation

Dramatically changing the landscape around the WIPP to showcase the danger of the area (see below image)

This piece of speculative design works to address issues and answer tough questions that we currently create for ourselves. Namely, how do we warn future generations about the dangers that we have created?

For more on this topic, be sure to check out the 99% Invisible podcast episode on the topic- as well as this Vox video covering the issue.

Is it right for you?

Speculative design gives designers an opportunity to stretch their imaginations and develop new and boundary-pushing systems and prototypes for the future.

And while it can be a tough sell in today's market, businesses and governments are starting to recognize its value. Even large corporations like Google user to explicitly dedicate time for their employees to embrace speculative design. The results have been wildly successful products like Google Maps and Gmail.

"By speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable," Raby and Dunne say, "and although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening."

Want to learn more about the future of design?

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Speculative design: 3 examples of design fiction | Inside Design Blog

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In praise of designing for a future we can't quite see.

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Paola Antonelli is senior curator of architecture and design, and director of research and development, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. She is on a mission to introduce-and explain-design to the world. In 2015, she was recognized with an AIGA Medal for "expanding the influence of design in everyday life by sharing fresh and incisive observations and curating provocative exhibitions at MoMA." Antonelli has been rated one of the 100 most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review and Surface Magazine, and one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries by Time Magazine. Daniel Pittman interviewed Antonelli in New York on behalf of LA+ Journal.

"LA+ in Conversation with Paola Antonelli," LA+ Journal, No. 9, spring 2019

I am intrigued by your statement, "It is important to stay relevant and to look to museums as the R&D of society." What kind of R&D does MoMA do?

With R&D, one of the initiatives that was started right away were the salons. We've had 23 of them, and they have covered topics ranging from culture and metrics, to taboos, death, truth, and the changed role of the objects in the world today. These themes are at the same time philosophical and very real in the sense that they are central and important to every human being.

We are exploring the role of museums as engaged in helping society and citizens deal with important matters in their life, by offering art as a place for experimenting, thinking, and having discussions at a more active and inspiring level. That's the kind of research that MoMA does. It's research about the human dimension, the human condition. That's what artists really do, too. They explore and dig deep into our nature, warts and all, and help us understand it so that we can build a more human and humane future.

You have spoken of your curatorial stance having to evolve with technological change. What kinds of technological change are you currently interested in and why?

I've always been interested in technology; I got my degree in architecture from a polytechnic, so I was very close to people in the engineering department. I believe that technology is the foundation that gives the reality check, spice, and true sense of possibility to architecture and design. The difference between design and art is that design has to be reality based - even when it's speculative, it always emanates from reality.

I've always loved the grounding of technology, and I believe that design is the enzyme that makes innovation happen. Scientific revolutions, historical upheavals, and technological discoveries would not become part of our lives without designers. Designers are the ones that can take the internet when it's still lines of code and give it an interface that makes it usable by everyone. Designers are the ones that take innovations like AR [augmented reality], or even something like microwaves, and create objects that make the technology usable. Of course, they collaborate with engineers all the time, but the last step, the last connection is made by the designers; so, technology and design go hand in hand.

Augmented reality interests me - I like the fact that it doesn't detach you completely from reality. I'm also very much interested in 3-D printing, but not just as an artistic medium. Rather, I'm interested in the kind of 3-D printing that can also be achieved with biological materials. I'm interested in the wet revolution. I'm interested in how biology is front and center in the world of engineering and of design right now. I'm working on a new project that is called "Broken Nature" for the next Triennale di Milano. It's based on the idea of restorative design - design that tries to reconnect some of the severed threads that we have with nature at all scales. There's a lot of biodesign in it.

Do you see a continuity or consistency in how you treat these different technologies or does each create their own opportunities?

I work with a general theory of design that I apply to different fields. For example, I think of bio-bricks and code as the same kinds of tools as real bricks. Even though the theory and the approach might be the same, the outcome is different because the potential that these tools offer are completely different. Good design happens when you set goals and then use the means at your disposal in an economical, efficient, and elegant-even formally elegant-way. Though the realms are different, and the goals might be different, the way I evaluate design is always the same. How did you get to the goal that you set out for us, and does this goal add something to the world?

It might seem very theoretical, but if you go through some examples, you realize that it is a quite sensible set of criteria that can be used by every human being. I believe that my role as a curator is not to tell people what is good or bad, but rather to help them fine-tune their own critical tools.

You mentioned the wet revolution and biodesign earlier; is designing life the next frontier? Should we be reassured, or should we be afraid?

I don't think there's anything reassuring, no. It is exciting, and it's also fearful. I had a very strange experience a few years ago when I realized that design is not all for good. It can be for evil too. When I heard about the 3-D printed gun, I experienced a flow of emotions that went from being stunned to being angry at myself for being stunned, because, of course, whenever you do something, it can be used one way or the other.

The same happens with biodesign. There's something amazing about biodesign when it comes to ethics. It posits very deep questions, and it puts you as a human being in a state of crisis. It can provoke questions as simple as asking vegetarians if they would eat meat grown in vitro, delicious, normal-tasting meat, but harvested without touching an animal. I had a similar experience in 2008 when I did an exhibition called "Design and the Elastic Mind" that was about design in science. One piece ("Victimless Leather") I showed in MoMA was an object of biodesign. It was in an incubator that nourished mouse stem cells to grow over a scaffold of proteins in the shape of a miniature coat. The designers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr came to New York from Perth, Australia, and together with colleagues from Columbia University, set everything up for the exhibition. After a few weeks though, the coat was growing in a strange way. A sleeve was too long. It was growing too big and clogging the incubator.

So, I contacted Oron and Ionat in Australia and explained what was happening. They said, "Well, you know what? It's not growing well. You have to stop the incubator." I told them, "One second. That would mean killing the coat." And they explained, "No, no, it was never alive." Even though I've always had firm beliefs about abortion rights, I really had a hard time killing-I thought at first it was killing-that coat. It compels you to think about it long and hard.

This year is Frankenstein's 200th anniversary, and it's a big deal. Not only in the world of movies and fantasy, but also in the world of biodesign. The ethical implications are truly deep, and that's what biodesign does - it allows us, when it's speculative, to really ask ourselves questions. Then of course, when it is directly applied and becomes reality, it's out of our control.

I'm sure that there are things happening in labs and universities all over the world that would scare the bejesus out of us, but at the same time, there's not much that we can do. I don't think that anyone could ever have a magic wand and make evil, or even just misguidedness, disappear from Earth. We should be afraid, but in the same way we should have been afraid five centuries ago.

Your contributions to MoMA's permanent collection are famous and varied-the @ sign, ancient algorithms-what would you add if you could?

One of my obsessions (that now is actually becoming impossible) is to acquire a Boeing 747, but without having the plane here at MoMA, instead letting it fly. The problem is that 747s are being grounded now, and it kills me because it's the dromedary of the skies. It's so beautiful. It really tears my heart. The idea was to keep it flying by making a deal with an airline - two or three aircraft that are used to fly through New York would be the MoMA ones. If you happened to take a MoMA flight, you would get a special boarding pass that would point you towards the amazing design details on the 747. You would also be able to take a 10-minute guided tour before the plane took off that points out all these different features. The plane would have the same configuration as other 747s, because that's a design choice, but maybe a different upholstery fabric and re-edited cutlery. Then maybe too the onboard store would sell MoMA design store items. It was this beautiful construct, but I know it's never going to happen. Just having these discussions is so fascinating to me because it makes you wonder what the job of a curator is.

I believe that the job of a curator is varied - there are different kinds of curators. In the case of art, it's important for museums to own the art, take responsibility and be accountable, because art often comes in a unique form. But, when it comes to design, we can also just produce lists. For instance, we did an exhibition in 2004 called "Humble Masterpieces," and the whole premise was that we could have an exhibition with these objects, but in a way, you could have your own collection too. The show included things like Post-It notes, Chupa Chups, Jelly Beans, staplers, and the brown paper bag. These are masterpieces of design, but they're humble masterpieces that you also have at home.

Design is a wonderful part of a museum like MoMA because as the founding director, Alfred Barr, said many, many years ago, design was the opportunity that everyone had to have art in their lives. At that time, they equated art with design and design with art. To me, design is not art, but still, it's a beautiful field of human creativity. It's even more beautiful because it can be had by many.

Your exhibitions are often framed with explicit acknowledgement of complexity and context. Is this going to be increasingly the norm given the material that you are dealing with?

I think it has to become more of the norm. It's not yet. There are many museums and curators of design that still think of the object as disconnected from its context, but it's changing. It's changing in an irresistible way - in all kinds of philosophical or cultural studies, the idea of context has become fundamental. When you think of context in terms of design, the context is the whole system of production: the sourcing of materials, the design, manufacturing, and also the life cycle. It's what happens to design when it is no longer in use and is being recycled or biodegrading. It really is important to remain conscious of the fact that an object is not coming from outer space. It's something that has a past, a present, and a future.

So, if the planet is now an object of design, can design save the world?

It's interesting because the most advanced designers and architects are the ones that have understood that the world is not an object of design, but rather that the world is a designer. There are many architects and designers who are trying to learn from nature's processes, or even coopt nature to grow objects and buildings, as opposed to design them from the top down. The realization of how we have imposed our will on the planet has led some really interesting designers to look at things from the other viewpoint.

I don't think that any category of thinkers or doers can save the world. First of all, I'm not even sure that the world needs saving. Maybe the best way would be for us to become extinct, and then the world would go on by itself to a better future. I think that we can all work together though. Designers are very good at building interdisciplinary teams and at understanding issues and setting goals. I believe designers should be more central to policymaking, to governing, to projecting, and to thinking long term. They should definitely be used better, and they should position themselves better.

I don't know that it would save the world, but designers definitely could help our species design a better ending, so that the next dominant species will remember us with a little respect. I really believe that we should be better and that designers can help us be better because they have a certain clarity that is ethical, but also aesthetic. Aesthetics are a form of respect of human communication, so it's much deeper than one would think.

Since MoMA's Rising Tides exhibition and the completion of major public works in New York, works of landscape architecture have been somewhat in the spotlight. If you were to put together an exhibition on the contemporary landscape, how would you approach it?

I would approach it by mixing digital and real. I think it would make it much more interesting. When I think of digital landscapes, I'm not just thinking of Second Life or video games. I'm also thinking of very simple WordPress sites, because I consider those environments and landscapes too. We need to recognize that we spend a lot of time in digital environments. Sometimes they are on the scale of interior designs, and other times they are as large as territories. We need to learn from the real world to also apply critical tools to the digital world.

Of course, there are great examples of landscape design all over the world, and they can be organized in an exhibition in a very thoughtful way, but I think that it would be most interesting to create bridges and connections and be intersectional. Maybe have trios of Western world, non-Western world, and digital, and give a taxonomy that always leads you through these three different dimensions.

This article is also available here.

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Paola Antonelli is senior curator of architecture and design, and director of research and development, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. She is on a mission to introduce-and explain-design to the world.

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Dunne and Raby, Designs for an Overpopulated Planet, №1: Foragers (2009), Video still

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What is speculative design? Perhaps it is important to start the conversation with a simpler question: what is design? And what does it mean to design something?

Just about everything we use in everyday life has been designed by someone. From something small and obvious like our mobile phones to something larger and perhaps less obvious like the experience of ordering take-out on said phones, you can see how the majority of our lives are lived through objects and experiences that were designed. The ubiquity of design as a word is so widespread it seems that design has completely integrated itself into the contemporary tongue. We speak of the design of things all the time. Sometimes, we even speak of designing things ourselves!

Yet despite its omnipresence, design still remains a rather elusive and mysterious practice. What counts as design? And what do designers really do? There are a plethora of professions that end with design as suffixes; professions like interior design, product design, or graphic design to name a few. And it is easy to assume that the type of work done in these professions, at least on the surface level, is primarily about aesthetics.

There are also other professions, whose titles still categorically end with the word design, that concern themselves not with the processes of beauty but rather the processes of thought. This includes professions like information design, design management, software design, urban design, service design, and user experience design.

It may come as a surprise, that the differences between these design disciplines and the aforementioned group are in fact not very many. Despite their differences in objectives and job descriptions, these design disciplines share a fundamental approach. That is they recognize design as a thinking activity. Unlike artists who work in the interior space of individual curiosities and personal interests, designers collaborate in the exterior space of solving real-world business problems.

User experience design ( UX design in short), utilizes practices that intersect those found in psychology, sociology, and behavioral sciences to study and understand the human condition and context of a given business goal. This human-centric approach makes UX designers valuable to organizations that want to make sure their products answer real consumer pains and values.
Major tech companies today understand the value of design, as they employ more and more designers into progressively strategic and business-critical roles to help connect complex technologies to everyday people.

UX designers spend a lot of time talking to customers. This allows them to understand how their designed product will be used by real people. But this approach is not without its faults. So it may be highly possible to predict how a customer segment will respond to a product in the year of its release, but what about the next 5 to 10 years to follow?

When introduced into the world, products begin to have a life of their own as new customer segments may adopt the technology, and new behavioral patterns may emerge as the products assimilate into the culture. How can we make sure our products will affect society as we intended? And what if our products end up causing more harm than good?

We cannot predict the future. But it is possible, if not altogether necessary, for us to speculate on the societal effects of our designed products.

A term coined in the '90s by design academics Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, speculative design is the practice of hypothesizing future products, systems, and services to conceptualize how they might affect societies of the future.

Dunne & Raby, PPPP (2013)

This diagram by futurologist Stuart Candy, redrawn by Dunne and Raby, illustrates an approach to the practice and vision of speculative design. Projecting from the present onwards, the diagram breaks the future down into 3 main cones according to the likelihood of their actualization.

1. The Probable is where traditional design operates. It describes what we can assume will happen judging from how the world currently is.

2. The Plausible begins to ponder further into the space of scenario planning and foresight. It describes alternative futures and the possibilities of could be's and what if's.

3. The Possible goes beyond, to extreme scenarios of what is scientifically possible. This includes utopias and dystopias, while never crossing into the realm of fantasy or science fiction.

Somewhere between probable and plausible future scenarios exists a reality that is preferable. Whether or not the future we are heading towards will develop into a preferable one is the crux of the work that speculative designers do.

But preferable to whose standards? It is not up to designers to mandate what is and isn't preferred. This is why speculative design is more about raising questions than providing definitions of how things ought to be. Its opposite would be affirmative design, which is design that reinforces the status quo.

Above is another image by Dunne and Raby that describes the positioning of the practice in contrast to more traditional methods of design. By all means, B isn't meant to replace A, but it does give context and dimension for conversations about the possibility of design as a tool for thinking.

Speculative design projects often take shape as design proposals, in the medium of exhibitions, films, novels, product design, and sketches. They are ideas that take shape in the world through the means and methods of design production. Some rely on heavy research and collaboration with experts from related fields of science, technology, economics, or politics, while others employ the narrative and aesthetic structures of design to paint convincing pictures and articulate profound arguments.

It is not that speculative design is something far removed from our lives either. An example is Charlie Brooker's science fiction anthology TV series Black Mirror, which examines the possible unanticipated consequences technology may have on modern societies.

In an episode titled Nose Dive (2016), we are introduced to a world where every interaction we have with others is rated by them on a 5-star scale review, where our average rating affects our socioeconomic status and our access to public and private services. In this world our online and offline lives interweave seamlessly as we know everyone by name and rating profile, we are well connected as everyone uploads everything on social media for likes, and we can rest assure that everyone will work hard and be kind to one another because the incentives of doing so far outweigh the consequences of low social ratings.

In this same world, we are bombarded by comparisons to people with higher and lower social ratings, the concept of privacy ceases to exist when everybody knows us by name, and gaps in economic inequality becomes magnified.

If you have seen Black Mirror, you know that the true horror of these stories lies in their resemblance to the world we currently live in. With a few wrong turns, we can imagine these scenarios becoming true in the near future. Film is a powerful medium because it immerses us into the world of an idea while remaining accessible to the mass and easier to digest than books or art.

In a series of speculative photographs titled When We All Live to 150 (2012), Jaemin Paik examines our quest for prolonging life and its implications on the model of families. When life expectancy is increased to 150, up to six generations may share the same household. The project follows the fictional life of 75-year-old Moyra and her sprawling contract-based family.

Moyra decides to renew her 30-year marriage contract with Ted, ensuring they receive better social support and tax benefits from the state. Age 82, Morya's second 30-year contract with Ted expires. She decides to leave Ted and move to a "two-generation" family where joins a new husband and a 52-year-old "child".

When people live to be 150, would the institution of marriage be reexamined? How would the architecture of homes change when families become more multi-generational? What are the financial implications of age, if retirement is still marked at age 60? The way we live our lives and the concepts we take for granted as self-evident are in fact highly influenced by many governing conditions of science, technology, politics, and philosophy.

Superflux (Anab Jain and Jon Arden), Song of the Machine, The Film (2011)

Song of the Machine (2011) is a short film produced by London based design studio Superflux that shows the world seen through a prosthetic device for people with reduced vision. Superflux is interested in the emerging field of ontogenetic studies, which combines genetic engineering and electronics to manipulate individual nerve cells with light. The studio entertains the question: what if we can use a virus to infect a degenerate eye with light-sensitive protein, via an eyewear device, to establish an optical link with the user's brain?

What Song of Machine proposes is the possibility of a new, enhanced reality for those with impaired vision to see parts of the light spectrum beyond human capability.​ A disability may cease to have negative connotations when it comes with an opportunity to see the world in a different, more vivid, and more informationally rich way.

Ettore Sottsass, Preliminary Project for Microenvironment (1971)

The process of speculation can vary depending on the practitioner. A project can be scientifically driven, technologically driven, culturally, and humanistically driven. Or it can also exist as a pure idea. Whereas heavily researched speculations are strong representations of how things could look like, ideas are purer, more immediate, and more malleable to development and discourse.

Speculation can be visualized simply through sketches, as Italian architect Ettore Sottsass has done in series of drawings, Preliminary Project for Microenvironment (1971), where he proposes what a nonmaterialistic household can look like. His drawings illustrate alternative living spaces where inhabitants are uninterested in furniture as precious fashionable objects to possess. Instead, furniture is reduced to material and aesthetic neutrality, shifting its focus to address possibilities of multi-functionality and use as communal assets shared in communal living spaces.

It is easy to see these projects as works of art, or even science fiction, but it is very important to know that speculative design is definitively not art. As art, the criticality of its messages can too easily be dismissed as fiction and fantasy. Speculative design follows the same processes of thought as traditional design so that its speculations are based on logic, research, and real possibilities. This possibility is what accentuates the power of speculative design. It is much more disturbing to know that life as we know it and our interactions with technology could very much be different than it is today.

To speculate is by definition to think about the future. Speculative design is a thought process that everyone can partake, and a conversation in which everyone is invited to participate in. Speculative thinking feels pertinent today amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a global reminder of how easily what we consider normal may crumble and change.

Normality is facing direct challenges as foundational aspects of our society are being disrupted. Global travel is abruptly put on hold. Social distancing is disrupting businesses big and small, causing millions to lose jobs in what is already turning out to be one of the largest economic crises of our time. The effects of change can be felt at the macro level, but also on the cultural and individual level. The way we work, talk, and travel has become much less of a physical activity and more of something that happens virtually, online. New words like social distancing emerge and enter the global tongue as language begins to adapt to a world that is much lonelier than before.

I have the utmost respect for everyone who is working tirelessly to fight this pandemic today. It is crucial that our research and development for solutions is done at speed. On the other hand, I think it is also important for us to take this time to slowly and critically study the changes that are happening in our lives. How is the design of everyday products and experiences playing a role in shaping the way our daily lives play out? And with how things are currently progressing, can we imagine the different possible futures that may lie ahead?

You may speculate with stories, drawings, detailed planning, or data-driven hypotheses. The power of ideas is that they can be inspirational, they can be infectious, and they can be catalytic. Since thinking requires no academic or technical expertise and is virtually free, we should all be encouraged to engage in thinking and dreaming about our individual present and ultimately our collective future. In uncertain times where our lives are becoming physically distant and isolated, perhaps it is through this that we may come together again in solidarity of thoughts and dreams?

I think it may be possible.

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Speculative Design: Thinking About the Future in Times of Uncertainty

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What is speculative design? Perhaps it is important to start the conversation with a simpler question: what is design? And what does it mean to design something? Just about everything we use in...

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Predicting the future is an exercise in futility. Time and again visionaries and hack prophets have predicted the end times or some disaster and time again it has been proven false. Now with speculative and critical design it seems that designers have taken up the mantle of fortune tellers, perhaps with a more attractive vision of doom and demise. Yet speculative designers would counter by saying that they are not in the business of prediction but asking "what if?" They are less interested in advocating for a future, rather to posit what could be as a means of debate through design. Understanding speculative design's stated aims helps towards understanding its impact. This also allows a proper criticism of critical and speculative design.

Some of the main voices in critical and speculative design are Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in collaboration, Matt Malpass, and Cameron Tonkinwise. These provide the context and direction for critical design from Dunne and Raby effectively creating a Speculative design manifesto in Speculative Everything, Malpass in helping to define the differences in practise with Critical Design in Context, and Tonkinwise with his criticisms of Speculative Everything and speculative design practise. To understand better the validity of speculative design first we need a definition, some criticism and examples of speculative design in practise.

What is critical design?

Critical design is a sub set of design practice which aims to question and interrogate the way the world functions and where it is headed through the means of discourse. Typically a designed object is made, usually not with the intention of being functional but instead to act as a prompt for discussion. This is the designs 'function'. Matt Malpass clearly lays out the criticisms of critical design and how they are largely flawed owing to a simple definition of function, the modernist definition. Malpass lays out a number of different meanings for the use of function as a criticism to show how many are wrongly interpreting critical design. While critical design is largely a form of product design it is done so typically outside of market constraints, and usually in academia. This allows for much more freedom to create and speculate, resulting in designs which aren't necessarily meant to be produced, but which take into account the industrial design processes and methods. The main purpose of critical design is to ask and raise questions, without advocating for a specific answer, but instead to leave the dissemination down to the public and people of influence;

"Although critical designers do not suggest what is the preferable future according to them; they encourage the society to reflect on it."

Speculative Design

The categories of critical design are a little confusing. Malpass lays out his taxonomy of critical design practises by including associative, speculative, and critical design as distinct elements. The main focus here is speculative design. Critical design is focused on the present and current design and social trends. Speculative design is more concerned with new tech and science and with exploring the future implications of those technologies. The aim of speculative design is to create discourse about how the "present is futuring" and to explore the implications of different technologies and science. Speculative design is concerned with the future, but also with different presents, or alternate histories and can deal with a world with different political situations, and the technological outcomes of these. Speculative designers do not to advocate for any of those different options but use it as a thought experiment to posit what could be.

This allows for speculative designers to explore the potential implications of the new technologies and sciences. They do this by putting a design, usually a prop, into an everyday context which is then brought to the public to start discussion and debate.

Speculative design and its influence

Satire and ambiguity play a large role in speculative design. Ambiguity of information is deliberately used in the design of the narrative around the object. This allows for peoples curiosity and imagination to flourish. Speculative design is most commonly associated with academic and scientific research and some speculative projects are referenced in academic papers.

As Matt Malpass states:

"Critical Design practice working in this way is being embraced by the sciences and in sociological discourses. In short, this is because facts and solutions end debates and evocative design opens up debates and is a powerful way to question hegemonic thinking."

By standing outside the market trajectory this acts as a way to envision different futures in the hopes of changing the current world.

In a project for Prophetic Prosthetics called Life Drop, a video was shown to people for them to comment on and discuss. The video depicted the day in the life of someone wearing a hypothetical blood donation prosthetic. Certain situations in the video caused reactions and responses for the participants. The responses were useful in gathering peoples attitudes towards a prosthetic for able bodied people as well as the ethical issues of having people drop off their blood and whether they would want payment or just a social reward. By doing this we can learn how people would respond to the prosthetics and see how people would react to such a system. While this isn't intended to be put into production the responses and attitudes have been collected for consideration.

From Integrating the user into the formatve stages of medical device usability design. Rowan Page

A problem with this method of design is that it is meant to pry at the various ideas and issues rather than be a viable product. I would posit that an actual product out in the world would have more impact and create more change, if that is the desired aim of speculative and critical designers. I would agree with Tonkinwise's criticism that in order to make more of an impact in the world the designers need to work closely with those creating the technology and science. An article by Rowan Page about speculative design and medical implants provides and example of how speculative design can be used. In this context it was used to generate debate and figure out what peoples views of the product were, a bit like market research.

Though this was used to develop a product and shape final outcome and the daily function in the eyes of the users. Page acknowledges the ambitions of speculative design as described by Dunne and Raby in their own research:

"This design practice is directed at usability improvements that will be achieved, not through solving 'problems,' but rather, through provoking and encouraging debate within the medical device manufacturer themselves; a debate that is inclusive of users in the formative stages of development."

This method fits with Tonkinwises criticism of using spec design with those who are creating the technology. Yet on the surface it looks like speculative design in this context is being used in the aims of the market, going against Dunne and Raby's ideals. It seems too limiting to suggest that speculative designs can't be used alongside corporations. By actively influencing the shaping of a medical product through debate influenced by speculative designs its possible to see a direct influence in the world which is a result of this field of design. The question then is if critical design is used to work alongside corporation is it still critical? If it wasn't critical then speculative design methods wouldn't cause a product or situation to change, which it clearly does in the example of the cochlear implants. Life Drop was useful in generating debate and expanding the definitions of prosthetics, but has little implications in the world at large, yet at least.

Conclusion

The field of speculative design is relatively new as a field in its own right. As such there are little data to pull form and limited writings on the effects of the topic on a larger scale rather than simply to start a conversation. The criticisms of critical and speculative design from Tonkinwise show how there is a distancing between the designer and advocating for a desired outcome as well as a limitation in the actual perceived impact that critical and speculative design can have. The lofty aims and ambitions for speculative design presented by Dunne and Raby provide a starting point for understanding what this field of design aims to accomplish. Malpass gives a more researched account for the differences in practise and Tonkinwise provides some valid criticisms. Life Drop and the Cochlear implants research provide two different ways for speculative design to be used. Life drop is speculative design for prosthetics, without any attachment to a product, whereas Page's research is clearly used in the development of a real product. The first method is unlikely to generate real change as there is no end goal past debating. The cochlear implant is a clear product and speculative design methods have been used to shape it and the way people use the product. From this its possible to see which method has the potential to create real change in moving towards a more desired future.

Links to References:
https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2018.1525830
Integrating The User Into The Formative Stages of Medical Device Usability Design: A speculative and Collaborative approach. Rowan Page
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Critical-Design-Context-History-Practices/dp/1472575172
Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practises. Matt Malpass
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Speculative-Everything-Design-Fiction-Dreaming/dp/0262019841/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=A3VZ0NGHKRGJBRFZVRZB
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
https://doi.org/10.2752/144871314X14159818597676
How we intend to future: Review of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, fiction and social dreaming. Cameron Tonkinwise.
https://youtu.be/kiYvaHDfvas
Life Drop Video Fraser McCafferty, Andrew Jackson and Rory Bain
https://doi.org/10.2752/175470813X13705953612200
Between Wit and Reason: Defining Associative, Speculative, and Critical Design in Practise

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"What if?": Understanding Speculative Design

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Predicting the future is an exercise in futility. Time and again visionaries and hack prophets have predicted the end times or some disaster and time again it has been proven false. Now with...

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You won't believe these five reasons why speculative design can't save the world

I gave this talk back at the Speculative Futures meet-up in London and it was super interesting. I've been teaching and on/off practicing some form of speculative design for years and have settled into an understanding of its limitations. I believe it is an useful research tool, but like any tool it can be used to help and maintain or to exploit and destroy. I'm always a bit vexed by the messiah-like reverence it can be treated with especially by the recent breathlessness it's being dragged up with in UX and design thinking circles. So when I was asked to talk about it at a meet-up aimed at sharing it amongst young professionals I decided to try and articulate some of my concerns about the overstepping of these limitations.

As a caveat, the audience were really great and very engaged in a discussion we had at the end with myself and the other presenter, J-Paul Neeley who was a bit more upbeat but equally wary. Also as another caveat, this talk is riddled with generalisations and broadsides which further confirm my unsubstantive polemical approach towards serious, nuanced discourse.

As another caveat, the audience were amazing the organisers perfect and J-Paul was a goddamn powerhouse of changing my mind, I hope he publishes his talk too.

Anyway, our story begins...

In around 2013 I asked 'What if? Then what?' I had been through Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art a few years previously but was seeing the difficulty of speculative design moving beyond the academy or the gallery. It seemed that here was a useful technique but it was struggling to translate provocation to meaningful change. I was practicing and studying in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis when that particular world of design was seized by the opportunity that the seemingly inevitable collapse of capitalism presented.

However, the last few years have seen speculative design proliferate in a different way, as part of the mainstream of the business of design - as service to profit and narrow definitions of 'good' and consequently reinforcing the very thing it was conceived of to critique. I'm going to deliver my worries about this trend in the form of five conceits or provocations that sort of flow off one another. They could probably use more thought tbh.

Speculative design seems, in its popular form, has lost its critical dimension. Perhaps my most major criticism is the appropriation of speculative design by the charlatan science of 'design thinking' and its deployment as a tool largely used for whitewashing corporate ambition and adding a patina of 'design research' to make a convincing argument. I've been part of these projects and have seen hundreds of them. Like any fad, the knock-offs quickly follow behind. However, this appropriation has meant that speculative design per-se is divorced from its critical origins. Rather than critiquing and antagonising the underlying institutions and structures that are complicit in the rampant social exploitation, irresponsibility and complacency that threatens the existence of societies, the species and the planet, speculative design used to make them 'better.'

Speculative design traces its origins to critical design and the broad corpus of critical practice across the social sciences, art and architecture. For me this critical practice elicits an antagonistic confrontation with social exploitation, irresponsibility or complacency in the same way as a good artwork, film or song might. This corpus can most easily be traced to the often-referenced radical movements of the late 1960's who provided an anathema to the central-planning modernism of most mainstream practice.

Superstudio were one of the most renowned of these practices and their principle, Adolfo Natalini, laid out the critical responsibility of creative practice in a lecture where he said...

Superstudio produced provocative future images of an homogenous global society and the world of it as a way of highlighting the complicity of design culture in the social divisions that were present in the everyday experience of people. They suggested design had a responsibility to challenge, not to serve. Though this approach was biting and is referenced in creative institutes the world over, it was largely inaccessible; design for designers. For most it had no tangible effect and it didn't connect with policy or social in any tangible way. It became an intellectual practice that created discussion but failed to spill over into the wider political discourse. Dunne and Raby, in their formulation of critical design addressed this issue explicitly:

It's fair to say that the range of projects which have connected more meaningfully and tangibly with publics and policy is greater than in the mid-20th century. There are some great projects that have had distinct effect on policy and informed public discourse. Unfortunately, in doing so, another problem in the speculative design thesis is brought to light.

What I mean here is that speculative design if often used for either dystopia generation or as ways of reinforcing, or, at best, mildly incrementing on current social conditions. There appears to be an unquestioned subtext that the European social democratic notion of 'progress' is preferable and speculative designs are cautionary tales about straying from this path rather than genuinely exploring alternatives.

This has been significantly better explored in the work of Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira, Dr. Ahmed Ansari and the work of the Decolonising Design group amongst others. Discussion between practitioners and theorists in the comments attached on Burton Nitta's Republic of Salivation project on Design and Violence is illuminating. Here, commentators pointed out the unquestioned political positioning of privilege when designers could work on projects about speculating on starvation while actual starvation was happening and as a seeming glamorisation and cautionary tale about change. A kind of speculative disaster tourism.

Questioning the politics of speculative design as a practice or method is useful because it acknowledges that at least it is a field that has a politics or acknowledges that designers are political actors, which other fields of design are often reluctant to do for fear of becoming activist. Here in Dunne and Raby's A/B Manifesto we can use the right-hand column to interpret principles of critical (and speculative, if you like) design but what's more important is the act of comparison itself; the idea that there is a position to be taken when practicing design that needs to be acknowledged. This is something that mainstream design is often reluctant to do.

The manifesto also suggests a questioning of what design is for, what the values of 'good' or 'better' are when we use these tools for 'improvement.' Is 'better' more profit? More engagement? More experience? Or is 'better' less engagement? Would it actually be better for a person to engage less with your service - to stream less music, to watch less television, to access less information? When using speculative design to 'improve' services or products the implicit belief is usually that 'better' is equivalent to 'more.' Consequently speculative design simply serves to reinforce existing design tendencies rather than question them.

Puling away form the individual design of a product or service its worth questioning how speculative design, as a subset of human-centred design or user experience is most often geared toward the interface of the individual and the organisation - the products and devices that people use rather than the systemic inequalities that inform these designs.

For example, Google and Microsoft in particular produce a good range of speculative design but also fund climate change denial. Design thinkers can cash in all the post-it notes they can get their hands on in an effort to 'improve' the products or 'better' the user experience but the market imperative of these companies is to maintain a status quo reliant on the exploitation of fossil fuels. Good speculative design in this context would be antagonising these systemic problems rather than targeting the user, which I'll return to later. Speculative design in the mainstream has largely retreated form these larger questions, not entirely of its own fault; Microsoft and Google would be reluctant to pay the invoices of designers telling them they are destroying the planet.

This is a problem beyond speculative design perhaps and more a problem of design per se, in particular that of human-centred design. In this individualistic mindset, responsibility is the burden of the individual, given under the premise of 'autonomy.' This has the effect of atomising collective or social responsibility into information-rich individual bubbles where it's imperative on the individual to improve themselves at the behest of the organisations making technology.

Think of basically every app ever made. Every app geared toward 'improvement' is about changing the lifestyle of the individual in order to conform to the worldview of the organisation producing the app. This precludes a dialogue about why that company are funding climate change denial because, by design, are at fault for the world's problems and need to change. When speculative design is deployed to improve these types of interactions it invariably light-touches on the way the information is delivered or the type of interactions by which it is received. It never attempts to reignite a sense of collective responsibly for change or the spiritual necessity of Earthly survival.

The argument most often used in counter to this idea that, essentially, speculative design is not deployed critically or antagonistically to a point where it has meaningful effect is that of trickle-down. This is the idea that speculative design will influence decision makers and students of design toward more conscientious practices and wider critical consideration. My concern is that this just simply isn't good enough. We don't have the time for trickle-down effects or incremental improvement of exploitative organisations.

We don't have a good speculative design for planetary-change. The operating model of the business-design pipeline is exploiting the planet at one end and users at the other. The idea that these might in fact be the same thing would mean admitting that an operational focus on individual users and discrete time windows was ineffective design. And large sprawling change over massive time windows and shifting human/non-human interactions does not conform to the way in which revenue is reported. Again, this isn't the fault of speculative design; designers need to eat. But, under these conditions we can't to look at it as a catch-all solution for planetary collapse.

The idea that there is genuine investment in trickle-down, incremental improvement is not justification enough for light-touch or non-critical practice. And speculative design is toothless as long as the ultra-rich and leading organisations secure themselves against what they admit is an almost inevitable climate and social collapse. There is no more a genuine investment in incremental improvement through design than there is through legislation. Speculative design has failed to achieve the meaningful tools for change that we once hoped for and has instead been co-opted as a white-washing exercise for tech companies who fund climate change denial and buy high-altitude property to escape rising sea levels.
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I'm away next week so no blog from me unless it's a terrible week and I am so bored that I want to brave blogger's mobile interface. Ha! no.
Tx

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Five Problems with Speculative Design (Pensee, Germinal, 227)

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You won't believe these five reasons why speculative design can't save the world I gave this talk back at the Speculative Futures meet-up ...

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Design that we see on a daily basis is partially limited to practicality. Its goal is to primarily solve existing problems or at least make this world a slightly brighter place. In 2019, it's simply not enough. In the era of rapid technological development, this approach is a form of denial of the difficulties and challenges the future has in store for us.

Speculative design is an interesting field of design that aims to model the possible scenarios of the future. It questions things like what could happen if we give up our integral rights and freedoms in favor of a state. What if gadgets start to control our behaviors? Or, maybe, a woman decides to deliver a shark instead of a child? As interesting as it sounds, we thought to cover all the highlights of speculative design.

We put this article together after one of our events - Creative Loop: Kyiv-Berlin . During this event for creatives, an art-director of a Berlin-based studio, Super an der Spree Anfisa Hleb, - who researches speculative design phenomena - told us why it's not enough to deal with one thing at a time and which projects we should start paying attention to.

What is speculative design?

Speculative design emerged in the early 90s as a blend of discursive and critical design practices. Although being a relatively new phenomenon, it managed to become a large-scale platform for discussion of ethical, cultural, social, and political implications.

In the book " Speculative Everything ", its pioneers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby say that speculative design began to prosper because of imagination. Working on such projects, designers have complete freedom of action. They constantly seek new solutions, as the aim of speculative design is to create products and services for different "What if ..?" scenarios.

The practice shows that creatives prefer to speculate on the most terrible situations that society may encounter some time in the future. Hopefully, their projects will help us make the world a better place to live in.

5 speculative design projects that will blow your mind

Facestate is a research project by an Amsterdam design studio Metahaven that criticizes contemporary liberalism.

In Facebook, we talk a lot about the importance of human rights and freedom. We often share initiatives on a state's non-interference in the economy and like posts about a free market. However, the most popular social network in the world is not going to comply with these principles. Facebook is fighting for a monopoly and, owning WhatsApp, Instagram and a dozen other large companies, boldly changes user agreement conditions in its favor.

These consequences of Facebook's influence on our lives are described in the Facestate project in detail. What if the social network becomes an independent state that makes the theory of social contract a reality? As blindly accepting any user agreements, we allow Facebook to control social processes.

To showcase what would happen if people give up their rights in favor of a hypothetical state, designers have created an identity of a fictional Facestate that includes a passport, a face recognition device, a digital wallet and other items in line with their concept.
Metahaven's Facestate / Walker
Dougal Dixon wrote the book " After Man: A Zoology of the Future " in 1981 but it remains relevant even today. The author suggests that in 50 million years after the extinction of humanity Europe and Africa, Asia, and North America will become newly-formed continents, and South America will separate from Central America. These changes will provoke the next evolutionary processes, and new species of animals and plants will appear in the world.

To make his suggestions less terrifying for the audience, his hypothesis is based on the evolution theory and contemporary ecological changes. Now, the estimated future does not seem frightening and provocative, as the book is filled with illustrations.
After Man: A Zoology of the Future / Amazon
According to the non-commercial organization Forum for the future, by 2025, the world population will increase up to one billion people. This number leaves everyone stunned and concerned but Ai Hasegawa was brave enough to find a solution to this issue.

He suggests that in the future, an alternative technology will appear which will allow women around their 30's to become pregnant with an endangered animal. Thus, using biomedicine, we can avoid overpopulation of the planet and make the reproductive power of the female body useful.

Although the project looks like a fantasy of a mad artist, Ai Hasegawa's theory is research-based. The designer has conducted a scientific study and developed a scheme of how it all could look in reality.
I Wanna Deliver a Shark / Ai Hasegawa
Eduardo Kac is a designer who works on science-related projects. He aims to make biotechnology more poetic and philosophical. For example, in " Natural History of Enigma ", he tracks the relationship of life between different species.

It took the designer five years to create a new form of life - a genetically modified flower "Edunia" - a hybrid of Petunia and himself. The red lines are the veins of Eduardo, and the petals have the color of human skin.

Although there are a lot of questions about if such a future can be regarded as a realistic one, the project is not just a plot of imagination. The scientist N. Olszewski helped to get Eduardo DNA for the experiment.
Natural History of the Enigma / Eduardo Kac
It seems that speculative design lacks irony and Bernhard Hopfengärtner worked on it quite well. In the project, the designer makes fun of the universal desire for freedom of choice, as with the help of technology we are trying to make our lives as easy as possible and avoid the responsibilities of decision-making.

We rely on algorithms to generate news in our feeds, to offer products in online stores, to suggest which movies to watch or where to go for lunch. The proposed solution is that all ll decisions that a person has to make in everyday life can just pass them on technology.

For the " Belief Systems " project, Bernhard Hopfengärtner has developed six different video scenarios of the world, in which gadgets control people through emotions. In one of them, neurotechnologies read facial expressions of the newlyweds and predict the likelihood of their divorce within 15 next years with an accuracy of more than 90%.

The other one speculates on the situation when one needs to buy a kettle. To do that, you go to a machine, make a payment, and get access to dozens of teapots. As the pictures change, the machine scans one's facial expression and decides which kettle you want.

The proposed scenario is a call for us to think if we really want technologies to unite to ease any kind of manual effort.
Belief Systems / Bernd Hopfengaertner
In general, these projects about pregnancy with a shark, a flower with a human's DNA, and gadgets that control our decisions predict the worst scenarios that can happen in the future. Designers ask questions not only for themselves but also for the entire society.

Designers focusing on speculative design try to imagine our future or the world of tomorrow that might just change gradually or all at once. Perhaps these bizarre concepts, ideas, and technology will not seem so strange in the foreseeable future. We simply don't know.

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Speculative Design Projects That Will Blow Your Mind - Depositphotos Blog

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Design that we see on a daily basis is partially limited to practicality. Its goal is to primarily solve existing problems or at least make this world a slightly brighter place. In 2019, it's simply not enough. In the era of rapid technological development, this approach is a form of denial of the difficulties and challenges the future has in store for us.

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From cities and transport to food and wearables, design fiction spawns projects that are not only food for our dreams but also an incentive for a better future. Here, we cherry-picked some of the most vivid and beautiful examples of speculative design.

Speculative Design is one of the most exciting ways for designers to practice problem solving by design. Using Design Thinking and other methods, we can broaden our scope and develop boundary-pushing systems and prototypes that spur discussion about alternative ways of being and encourage imagination to flow freely. Design speculations have the potential to become the catalysts for redefining our relationship to reality and cultures; the results are truly inspiring, with a seductive vividness and a promise of a far future that is not far from science fiction stories.

Take a step into the future with these amazing examples of future design.

Together with a group of futurologists, scientists, and Internet users from all corners of the globe, Kaspersky - which has been developing innovative solutions to protect cities and businesses for more than 20 years - has created this beautiful website.

Earth 2050 is intended to show a picture of how people will live in 20 or 30 years' time, including what threats will exist, what our lives will be like, what jobs we will have, what we will eat, and how the physical world will interact with the virtual. The website allows you to select a year - 2030, 2040, or 2050 - and look at the predictions for different cities and countries. You can vote, comment, and make your own predictions too.

Neo_Fruits is a Speculative Technological Design Project, by Industrial Designer Meydan Levy, that explores a future scenario where humans will create food artificially. In this project, artificial fruits are designed and printed in 4 dimensions, to offer a nutritious and vitamin-rich alternative to familiar fruits. With the introduction of industrial processes and increased capabilities of scale, food processing techniques have caused our food to move away from its original makeup, making this "new food" poorer in nutritional value. According to Levy, the gap between the nutritional need of what our bodies require and the food that enters our digestive tract needs to be bridged.

Today, 4D printing technologies enable the creation of endless objects and structures. Neo_Fruits are produced with this technology using Cellulose - an organic material. The dry structure is then reinforced with phyto-chemicals and strengthened by micro-tubes. After printing, mineral and vitamin enriched liquids are injected into the micro-tubes, making the fruits come to life, giving them volume, color, texture, and flavor.

MORI Art Museum, in a temporary exhibition called Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow, showcasing over 100 projects, aims to show what life may look like in the next 20-30 years, and ponder the possibilities of that new world. All the projects serve as a means to help us reflect on environmental issues, human lifestyles, and the likely state of human beings and human society in our imminent future.

Taking into account, the effects of climate change, technological and biotechnological advancement, and an increasing world population, all the projects exhibited at MORI give us a glimpse of what our reality might look like soon enough. For example, the Paris-based architect studio XTU has envisioned a 2050 where Earth has become inhabitable due to rising temperatures, unbreathable air, and volatile weather. So, to escape an overheated planed, they imagined that humankind will inhabit the sky.

Copenhagen-based architecture studio BIG, instead, designed a solution where people can live sustainably in cities floating on the ocean. As coastal cities struggle to cope with rapid population growth, many simply pour sand into the ocean to create new land, destroying millions of hectares of the ocean and marine life. Furhermore, the rising sea levels and climate change are compounding the problem. With Oceanix, BIG is taking a bold step towards the future.

4. Compression Carpet

The Compression Carpet is a machine that offers a hug to a person craving intimacy, mimicking the positive effects of a human hug. The Carpet requires two people to operate; one lying down inside the machine, and one turning a crank to slowly increases pressure.

Body architect Lucy McRae envisions a future where the growing use of technology has a big impact on people's mental wellbeing. She imagined a future with a lack of human touch, wondering whether mechanical touch, rather than physical contact with other humans, will become the solution, serving as a stress antidote.

Because of our increasing interest and obsession with digital and the possibility that global pandemics may occur again in the future, we might become more physically isolated. That's why McRae wants to explore the cultural and emotional impacts science and technology can have on mankind. In one of her past projects, The Institute of Isolation, she looked at how humans can prepare their bodies for life in outer space.

Will machines be designed to affectionately caress and squeeze the body, in attempt to prepare us for a future that lacks human touch? Taiwanese designer and engineer Dan Chen has already developed a machine designed to guide and comfort dying patients with a scripted message, called the End of Life Care Machine. This robot is essentially a comforting massage machine; when a patient is close to death, their arm is placed under the robot apparatus, which is positioned on the deathbed. The patient can also leave this world while hearing words like "We hope you will have a pleasant afterlife". Perhaps in the future people will choose to die having their pain and loneliness soothed by a robot, instead of suffering alone.

Akon City is a green and futuristic city project ideated and carried by the Senegalese-American RnB singer Akon. The green city, which has recently been launched near Mbodième, a small village in western Senegal, is inspired by Wakanda, the name of the fictional African kingdom where the superhero movie Black Panther by Marvel is set.

The sustainable city will be home to parks, universities, schools, a hospital, a stadium, hotels, as well as an industrial complex. The city will also operate exclusively with the Akoin crypto-currency. The first phase of the project has already started, and will result in the construction of roads, the main buildings, a landfill and a photovoltaic solar power plant by 2024. Akon City is expected to be completed in 2029.

On the wave of Senegal's growing economy, Akon City aims at setting a new standard for all future real estate development. The city, with its distinctive futuristic architecture and design, will be divided in seven different districts.

6. Alias - a voice UI parasite

Alias is a teachable "parasite" designed by Bjørn Karmann to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you. Equipped with speakers and a microphone, Alias is able to communicate and manipulate the home assistant when placed on top of it. When not used, the speakers of Alias interrupt the assistance with a constant low noise that feeds directly into the microphone of the assistant.

Karmann believes that our relationship with technology is formed from how we interact with it, but too many commercial smart products for the home tend to treat the user as a passive consumer. Therefore, he intended to create a product that would redefine this relation, especially when it comes to privacy. Exactly how cordyceps fungus and viruses can appropriate and control insects to fulfil their own needs, Alias acts as a parasite for smart home systems.

Will we be able to adapt to the consequences of climate change? Humans will have to adjust to a world transformed by food insecurity and climate extremities. Mitigation of Shock (London, 2050) is Superflux ' attempt to make the size and complexity of a hyperobject like climate change tangible, relatable and specific.

The installation transports visitors into a London flat, around 2050 or so. Discarded newspapers and a radio show reflect the tensions of this new world, and experimental food production stacks occupy the space once given to relaxation. Changes in food production and preservation have led to the development of new recipes that seek to make the most of available food. The space looks somewhat alien, yet strangely familiar, providing an experiential insight into some of the challenges we could all soon face.

Can humans deliberately leave a geological trace of their existence? Human actions have altered the Earth so profoundly to generate and enter a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene, term that was used for the first time in the 60's by scientists of the Soviet Union. In this epoch, the stability of the biosphere is threatened, biodiversity is diminishing, and ecosystems look more and more similar to one another, with an uncomfortably high probability of an uninhabitable planet within the next century.

This devastation will leave traces in the rock strata for geologists of the future: plastic pollution, soot from power stations, nuclear fallout, and surprisingly, the fossilized bones of the global proliferation of the domestic chicken.

Nonhuman Nonsense, a research-driven design and art studio that embraces the contradictory and the paradoxical - telling stories that open the public imaginary to futures that currently seem impossible. Founded by Leo Fidjeland and Linnea Våglund, the studio is based between Berlin and Stockholm.

Their Pink Chicken Project suggests using a "Gene Drive" to change the colour of the entire species Gallus Gallus Domesticus to pink. Being the world's most common bird, the bones of the 60 billion chickens that are killed every year leave a distinct trace in the rock strata, which is a marker for our new geological age Anthropocene. This project would genetically modify chickens, giving them pink bones and feathers, using a gene from the insect cochineal that produces a pigment that will be fossilized when combined with the calcium of the bone. This would modify the future fossil record, coloring the geological trace of humankind pink.

CRISPR has recently invented a genome editing tool, that is used to permanently modify genes in living cells and organisms. When used in a particular way, it creates a genetic system known as a Gene Drive, which the can permanently alter a species on a global scale in just a few generations.

For Nonhuman Nonsense, pink is a symbolic color, an opposition to the current global power dynamics, where a small group of humans in power carries out actions upheld by the injustices of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, heterosexism and ableism - aggravating the violence on the non-human world.

Want more examples of contemporary speculative practice and fictional architecture? Check out SpeculativeEdu and this section of Design Boom!

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8 Spectacular Speculative Designs That Will Blow Your Mind

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Speculative Design is one of the most exciting ways for designers to practice problem solving by design. Using Design Thinking and other methods, we can broaden our scope and develop boundary-pushing...

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As its name might suggest, Ultraframe is a study in well, frames.

Newly debuted by UM Project, Ultraframe explores texture, material, and structure at the joining of function and fiction. Ultraframe is also a study in contrasts - stiff, geometric frames are juxtaposed with soft, curvy covers, shells, or inserts. As a result, all the pieces have an otherworldly feel that seems familiar yet foreign at the same time. UM Project kept the colors subdued as well, so that the rich and carefully chosen materials could shine.

Photography: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO

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Newly debuted by UM Project, Ultraframe explores texture, material, and structure at the joining of function and fiction.

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Bjørn Karmann’s Project Alias is a good example of this. Alias is a “teachable parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants. It’s not mass produced, and is more intended to be circulated as an idea than as a product. It attaches to the top of any smart assistant and ensures that the “assistant” is unable to listen unless specifically called on by a code name. By presenting a new possible future, the project asks us to re-examine our comfort level with increasingly invasive surveillance technology.

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At the beginning of the year, we initiated a series of design investigations into the symbolic potential of charm bracelets. We aim to continually discover new avenues for expression within our practice, so while the project draws upon art direction, speculative design, jewellery design and identity design – we aren’t overly concerned with categorising the work. The exchanges between these various disciplines are more compelling; hence we maintain an open and inquisitive mindset.

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Seymourpowell has unveiled its latest beauty concept, Atmosphère, a duo of beauty devices that protect users from air pollution and toxic urban environments. This is the third in a series of concepts which explores the intersection of new beauty behaviors and advancing technology - following Identité and Élever.

The series consists of a wearable collar device and a chaise longue, which invite users to immerse themselves in a 'beauty bubble'. The devices deliver atomized beauty products via a pure vapor, providing physiological and psychological comfort in an era of urbanization, climate change and existential crisis.

The Atmosphère Collar is a contextually aware, wearable device designed to provide environmental protection and beauty treatments on-the-go. The device harvests location-based data and combines this with the users' personal data, such as skin type and moment-to-moment physiological needs such as access to clean air and comfortable temperature. Vents around the rim of the device give the product a sense of weightlessness, while sensors interpret the user's needs based on their location, and adjust the levels of air filtration, humidity and active beauty ingredients (such as sun protection factor) accordingly. In addition, as the mercury levels rise in the city, the product would dispense cooling sensations, offering the user relief from excessive heat.

Meanwhile the Chaise Longue is an intelligent furniture concept for the home. As the user reclines, the device encapsulates their body with biologically nutritious air. Acting similar to a retreat or spa, the concept offers users a safe environment within which to escape the unstable air quality outside. It creates the ultimate conditions for the body's skin, optimizing temperature and air quality, to make for a truly bespoke experience. Both items come with an accompanying app that reveals the vapor at work, thus reassuring users that they are protected from unwanted pollutants such as micro-plastics.

The ambition of the concept project is to provoke discussion on how the beauty industry may evolve with new technology to create potential beauty futures. "When we project ahead, we can see that life in the urban environment is going to be incredibly tough; poor air quality, restricted resources, soaring temperatures, long commuting times, loud and uncontrollable noise," commented Mariel Brown, Director of Foresight at Seymourpowell. "This uncomfortable reality will take its toll on our mental health and sense of wellbeing.

"The Atmosphère concepts aim to take the heat out of the situation by essentially working the beauty/brain axis. Scarcity of water will be the cause of a great deal of conflict in the future, and with this speculative project we wanted to imagine a future where 'water-heavy' beauty rituals might be replaced by entirely new tech-enabled sensorial experiences that allow us to feel rejuvenated and fresh."

Throughout their research with global early adopters, Seymourpowell witnessed a new urgency around cleansing rituals as people looked to detoxify their body, mind and soul. This extreme approach suggests the need for beauty solutions that deliver reassurance along with efficacy. Through Atmosphère, Seymourpowell imagines a future where people may no longer need to apply skincare, instead, new devices do the work for them.

"Given the state of our ever-shifting urban environment, it is important for companies to consider the impact the environment around us can have on both our physiological and physiological wellbeing," added Jonny Culkin, Designer at Seymourpowell. "Atmosphère seeks to explore how beauty brands can help not only to protect their customers from the changing climate but also provide a more mobile offering and service that actively works to respond to a user's environment.

"For beauty brands to successfully meet the demands of future consumers, they will need to stretch their thinking far beyond a formula in a pack. Instead they should explore the rich alchemy that is possible when you combine disruptive tech with new beauty behaviors."

Images: Courtesy of Seymourpowell

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Seymourpowell Unveils Atmosphère Beauty Concept

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Seymourpowell has unveiled its latest beauty concept, Atmosphère, a duo of beauty devices that protect users from air pollution and toxic urban environments.

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Imaginary language - educational toys for children by Alessandra Romario

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Children are the adults of tomorrow, for me designing for them means designing for the future. I strongly believe in supporting the next generation and giving them the tools to find their own way in the world. My design practice is often based on psychological or anthropological theories, as it is with Imaginary Language.

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Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News

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I'm not a parent myself but with a lot of my friends having their progeny, I am aware of the challenges of raising kids, especially during the pandemic and even in this digital age. Some common problems include kids stuck on their gadgets, not having enough interaction with other kids, etc. Oh, and those that are not in front of their screens are constantly writing or drawing on anything except paper, which more often than not is the walls of their house. What if all of these things can be solved with one device?

Designer: Hyungwoo Lee

This concept for a product called Doodle aims to solve some of these pain points faced by parents when raising young kids. The design and the idea for the device is of course inspired by all the doodles on the wall that young parents have most likely experienced. The device looks like a smart speaker except it is huge and is mounted on the wall. This way, instead of writing and drawing on the wall, they can interact with the fabric surface of the device and enjoy some of the interactive activities included in the concept.

The soft fabric display lets kids have a tactile interaction with the "screen" while they draw, write, touch, and interact with other kids who are also using the same device. There are LED lights under the surface so that it follows the fingers of the kid doodling on the Doodle. There are also times when they can press and squeeze the surface depending on the activity they want to do, like pop the balloons or squeeze to say hello or let their drawings "fly".

The concept also takes into consideration that kids grow tall fast. It has a height recognition sensor that will adjust depending on the height of the kid that's using the device. It's a pretty interesting concept for a device for children and the design is simple enough to blend into your wall. The design will be enhanced by the doodles and artwork that the young ones will create. Having something like this can help take them away from screens for a little while and also interact with other users as well.

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This doodle interactive wall creates fun times for kids and adults as well - Yanko Design

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I'm not a parent myself but with a lot of my friends having their progeny, I am aware of the challenges of raising kids, especially during the pandemic and even in this digital age. Some common problems include kids stuck on their gadgets, not having enough interaction with other kids, etc.

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Energy conservation is an important subject, and one that kids should be aware of. And the product in this post is designed for this purpose, teaching today's children to save energy with an interesting and visual way.

Tio, called by its designer Tim Holley, is a ghost-shaped light switch that gives kids a visual reminder of how much energy they've used by leaving lights on.

Tio starts out green and smiling. If the light is left on for more than four hours, he turns yellow and looks shocked. And if you dare to leave that light on for more than eight hours, sweet little Tio turns into a raging red hulk, complete with frown mouth and angry eyes. But he won't just visually remind your kids about their energy habits; information from the light switch is sent to Tio's computer program so the entire family can see how they're doing.

In a brilliant piece of visual positive reinforcement, Holley's program lets kids grow a "virtual tree" which gets bigger and healthier the more energy they save.

via

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Tio - Save Energy From Child - Design Swan

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Energy conservation is an important subject, and one that kids should be aware of. And the product in this post

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After Man: A Zoology of the Future is the first book of speculative zoology/evolution written by Dougal Dixon Published in 1981, it exposes though different descriptions and illustrations the inhabitants of the earth 50 million years in the future after the extinction of humanity and much of the Holocene megafauna.

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"We can not work towards an improvement that we can not imagine" - Elise Boulding
Speculative design is an approach to design that focuses on imagining future scenarios and possibilities. It can be used to explore social, political, technological, and ethical issues, and to generate new ideas and solutions.
Speculative design is not about predicting the future, but about exploring different ways that the future could be. By doing so, it can help us to better understand the present and make better decisions about the future.

The term "speculative design" was popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby as a subsidiary of critical design. The aim is not to present commercially-driven design proposals but to design proposals that identify and debate crucial issues that might happen in the future.

The two popularized the concept in their book, Speculative Everything: Design, Dreaming, and Social Dreaming

"[Speculative design] thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people's imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality."

According to Dunne and Raby, designers shouldn't just address issues of today, but also take a look into the future and ask, "How can we address future challenges with design?"

Speculative Everything was initially a list they have published a few years ago called A/B, a sort of manifesto, where Dunne & Raby added dimension B of design aspects to the dimension A.
"Speculative Design is a Critical Design practice that comprises or is in relation to a series of similar practices known under the following names: Critical design, design fiction, future design, anti-design, radical design, interrogative design, discursive design, adversarial design, futurescape, design art, etc." - Mitrović, I. (2015). An Introduction to Speculative Design Practice. (I. Mitrović & M. Golub, Eds.). Department for Visual Communications Design, Arts Academy, University of Split.
The goal of speculative design is not to provide definite answers, but to generate questions and provoke thought. It is a tool for critical thinking that can be used by individuals, organizations, and society as a whole.

At a very basic level, speculative design is about crafting and visualizing possible future experiences and products. It's about looking into the future and back at the present to understand how things might be connected and how they might affect one another. It's about being able to see the potential for things to develop, change, or grow over time. At its core, speculative design is about questioning the present and imagining possible futures. It's about looking at problems from a different perspective and considering new and different solutions to those problems.

This diagram by futurologist Stuart Candy, redrawn by Dunne and Raby, illustrates an approach to the practice and vision of speculative design. Projecting from the present onwards, the diagram breaks the future down into 3 main cones according to the likelihood of their actualization.

1. The Probable is where traditional design exists. It describes what we can predict that probably will happen judging from how the world currently is.

2. The Plausible begins to delve further into the areas of building scenarios and foresight. It describes alternative futures and the possibilities of could be's and what if's.

3. The Possible goes beyond, to extreme scenarios of what is scientifically possible. This includes utopias and dystopias, while never crossing into the realm of fantasy or science fiction.

There is a preferred version of the future that lies somewhere in the middle of probable and plausible scenarios. The core of the work that speculative designers do is determining whether or not the future we are moving toward will turn out to be better.

Designers do not have the authority to dictate what is preferred. Because of this, speculative design focuses more on asking questions than it does on defining how things ought to be.

In his book The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster tells the story of a bored boy named Milo who one day receives a tollbooth in the mail. The tollbooth transports him to a strange land where he has all sorts of adventures. Along the way, he meets a lot of interesting characters, including a creature called the Terrible Trivium.

The Terrible Trivium is a monster that loves nothing more than to ask pointless questions and give tedious explanations. He loves to talk but never says anything useful. In other words, he represents everything that is wrong with academia.

Juster's book is a satirical take on the education system, and the Terrible Trivium is emblematic of this. He is a map of unreality, leading Milo (and by extension, the reader) down a path of confusion and frustration. He embodies everything that is wrong with pedantry and intellectualism gone too far.

Some of the most important aspects of speculative design are its aesthetics. The term "aesthetics" is used in a variety of ways, but for our purposes we can think of it as a set of principles governing the appearance and/or presentation of an object or environment. In speculative design, these aesthetics are often used to create an atmosphere of unease or uneasiness, to make the viewer question what they are seeing and why it looks the way it does.

One common aesthetic used in speculative design is that of "unreality". This can be achieved through a number of different techniques, such as making an object look out of proportion, using jarring or unexpected colors, or playing with perspective in a way that makes the viewer feel disoriented. By creating something that looks "off" in some way, we are forcing the viewer to question what they are seeing and sparking their imagination as to what could be causing this effect.

Another important aspect of speculative design aesthetics is that of "futurity". This can be achieved through a number of different techniques as well, such as using clean lines and futuristic materials to create a sense of forward momentum. This aesthetic is often used in conjunction with others to create a overall feeling of unease or tension, as it gives the impression that something is not quite right or that things are not as they should be.

A typical design process goes like this: idea generation, research, ideation, iteration, and testing. But with speculative design, we add two extra steps: exploration and visualization. During the exploration phase, we go a step further and look for inspiration in emerging technologies, cultural shifts, and current events that could affect our project in the future. We then take these explorations and use them as jumping-off points to come up with new design solutions. In the visualization phase, we take our findings and bring them to life through sketches, storyboards, interactive prototypes, and other creative visualizations. We create temporary mock-ups and simulations that bring our ideas to life and help us better understand what they feel like in the real world.

Even though speculative design is used to create possible futures, we have to remember to make our visualizations realistic. This means basing them in the present and existing technologies. If a particular feature or design solution is too far removed from reality, it will be incredibly hard to create and implement. For example, if you're designing a hotel room in the year 2030, you can't design it to be some futuristic space that uses no technology that exists in the present day. It has to be based in reality. You have to imagine what the room would look like if we were able to create an entirely new hotel experience without any limitations.

To understand the approach and realm of speculative design, let's look into a speculative design case study - A masters research project dealing with the design of a learning experience about the speculative future of jobs for the next generation.
A report from the World Economic Forum tells us that by one estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don't yet exist. The jobs market of 2026 will likely look quite different from today's career landscape, so the next generation must be focused and prepared for this future career situation.
In the past, jobs didn't change much. Jobs such as police officers or teachers have existed our whole life. But in the near future, jobs will change faster.

Imagine future of jobs is a masters research project developed by Wongsathon Choonhavan in collaboration with Daphne Gerodimou. This project focuses on how to educate the next generation to face the unpredictable future jobs situation using imagination and Speculative Design practice.

There are many different ways to approach speculative design, but one common thread is that it is future-oriented. This means that speculative designers look at current trends and try to imagine where those trends might lead in the future. They ask questions like "What if this technology became widely available?" or "How would society change if this trend became more prevalent?"

This type of thinking can be applied to any area of design, from product design to urban planning. By looking at the world around us and imagining what could be, we can start to shape the future we want to see. So what does the future hold for speculative design?

As we become more reliant on technology, it's likely that speculative design will increasingly focus on how we interact with devices and artificial intelligence. We'll need to think about how to design user interfaces that are both user-friendly and ethical, as well as how to create experiences that seamlessly integrate virtual and physical worlds.

We'll also need to consider the societal implications of new technologies. For example, as autonomous vehicles become more common, we'll need to think about how they will impact our economy and workforce. Will there be a need for traditional taxi drivers? How will self-driving cars affect traffic patterns and congestion?

These are just a few of the many questions that speculative designers will continue to explore in the years ahead. By asking tough questions and envisioning different futures, we can help create a better world for all of us.

Speculative design is a great way to get creative with your designs and to think outside the box. It can be used to create products or services that don't yet exist, or to redesign existing ones. I hope this article has given you a better understanding of speculative design and how it can be used in business.
Speculative everything design, fiction, and social dreaming - Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby The Young Designer's Guide to Speculative and Critical Design - Leon Karlsen Johannessen Department of Design Norwegian University of Science and Technology Speculative - Post-Design Practice or New Utopia? What is speculative design - VINNOVA https://speculativeedu.eu/
If you're looking for more information on this topic, check out our other articles on the subject. Thanks for reading!

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THE BASICS YOU NEED TO KNOW AND UNDERSTAND ABOUT SPECULATIVE DESIGN

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Speculative design is an approach to design that focuses on imagining future scenarios and possibilities. It can be used to explore social, political, technological, and ethical issues, and to...

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It is a privilege to have someone in your life who is both a good friend and a personal hero. I'm fortunate to count among those rare gifts MoMA Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli - design oracle, crusader for humanized technology, curious octopus - whose shows continue to define and redefine design, expanding our understanding of it not only as a creative discipline but also as a cultural translator, social lubricant, and "interface between progress and humanity." Her latest exhibition, titled , which ran between July 24th and November 7th, 2011, explored with an unparalleled blend of excitement and insight the evolving communication between people and objects - a relationship all the more palpable, quite literally so, in our age of ubiquitous sensors and data feeds and interfaces, yet still rooted in our inextricable and increasingly complex relationship with the physicality of the analog world.

Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects (public library) is itself a meta-object in the exhibition - exquisitely produced and thoughtfully constructed to contextualize and illuminate the nearly 200 projects in the show, this analog artifact flows beautifully and seamlessly into the digital and mechanical world it encapsulates. An embossed faux-pixelated cover invites you to touch the "interface" of the book. On many of the pages, QR codes let you leap into a specific project's digital presence. The Cubitt Fax computerizes the printed page, exuding a kind of binary intimacy.

Antonelli writes in the introductory essay:

The bond between people and things has always been filled with powerful and unspoken sentiments going well beyond functional expectations and including attachment, love, possessiveness, jealousy, pride, curiosity, anger, even friendship and partnership.

And, indeed, the projects and objects featured span the entire spectrum of human intellectual and emotional investment. From the unapologetically analog and deeply personal, like Stefanie Posavec's handmade visualizations and Nicholas Felton's infographic life reports, to the widely exploratory and the wildly futuristic, like Christien Meindertsma's brilliant PIG O5049 project and Daisy Ginsberg's E.chromi "designer bacteria," the works cover (and uncover) interfaces, tools, devices, data visualization, video games, websites, and many more facets of this curious cultural shift we are witnessing, exploring the intersection and interplay of these various conduits of communication.

Talk to Me is also very much about locating the present:

In contrast to the twentieth-century triumph of semiotics, which looked down on communication as nothing but a mechanical transmission of coded meaning, the twenty-first century has begun as one of pancommunication - everything and everybody conveying content and meaning in all possible combinations, from one-on-one to everything-to-everybody. We now expect objects to communicate, a cultural shift made evident when we see children searching for buttons or sensors on a new object, even when the object has no batteries or plug.

Antonelli's talent for bridging the esoteric with the universal shines throughout:

In our relationship with objects, as in any relationship, indifference is the worst offense and laziness the worst sin.

Citing Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick and his five axioms of communication, defined in 1967, Paola examines how our paradigms of idea-transmission have both changed and remained the same half a century later:

The first axiom tells us, 'One cannot not communicate.' Any kind of gesture, behavior, and attitude can and will be interpreted as communication. In e-mail, for example, responding immediately to a message creates a particular subtext, as does not responding at all; a congratulatory message sent 'reply all' can be interpreted as displaying presence and authority or else insecurity, and an ill-advised response by a person who received only a blind copy reveals...something else.

The third axiom says, 'The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners' communication procedures.' Communication, Watzlawick posits, is cyclical, with each partner believing that he or she is simply responding to the other; some of the most common problems of the digital era arise from the cycle of amplification and reaction that marks our text exchanges, something that serial e-mail gaffers and awkward users will be familiar with. The problem is acute enough to require the invention of ToneCheck, developed by Lymbix, an emotional spell-check for e-mail messages that alerts the writer to excessive displays of anger, sadness, or insensitivity.

In the introductory essay, Antonelli also exercises her remarkable gift for explaining technical terminology and complex systems in layman language that takes none of the substance away, breaking down the four main design disciplines covered in the show:

Communication design focuses on delivering messages, and it encompasses most graphic design, signage, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design, which is sometimes brought under the more generic and functionalist rubric of user-experience design, delineates the behavior of products and systems, as well as the experience that people will have with them. Information or visualization design includes the maps, diagrams, and visualization tools that filter and make sense of the enormous amount of information that is more widely available than ever before. Critical design is one of the most promising and far-reaching new areas of study, using conceptual scenarios built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors. Its disciples are experts in 'What if?'

More than anything, Talk to Me is about both challenging and owning design as a centripetal force of culture:

Talk to Me is an opportunity to anchor design's new dimension and highlight innovative interfaces that can inform designers in the future. Whether they use the skin and shell of objects as an interface or animate them from within, designers are using the whole world to communicate and are set on a path that is transforming it into an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.

[...]

It might seem that design has abandoned its tested, grounded, functionalist territory to venture into an ambiguous universe where its essence is confused and a crisis of identity arises - is the 5th Dimensional Camera art or scientific modeling? Is Humeau's work creative paleontology? Are Sputniko!'s devices contributing to interpretive anthropology? Is Pachube mere coding and infrastructure engineering? Not at all. I claim them, with their powerful vision and their focus on knowledge and awareness, as design, and I praise their radical functionalism. Ambiguity and ambivalence - the ability to inhabit different environments and frames of mind at the same time - have become central to our cultural development. They are qualities that embody the openness and flexibility necessary for embracing diversity, and they are critical to the questioning and imagining that are the preferred methods of inquiry. Communication is at the nexus of all these necessary human features: the most critical function of design today.

Several essays by prominent cross-disciplinary thinkers contextualize the various thematic sections. In one titled "Reality Is Plenty, Thanks: Twelve Arguments for Keeping the Naked Eye Naked," the always-thoughtful Kevin Slavin asks:

As parlor tricks go, [virtual reality] is a neat one. Reality is built on human perception, entering consciousness through the human eye. If you add to the stack, you have something like reality, only more. But more what?

In another essay, "Conversations with the Network," Khoi Vinh observes:

The designer as author, as craftsperson bringing together beginning, middle, and end, becomes redundant in a space in which every participant forges his or her own beginning, middle, and end. And that is exactly what happens in networked media. The narrative recedes, and the behavior of the design solution becomes prominent. What becomes important are questions that concern not the author but the users. How does the system respond to the input of its users? When a user says something to the system, how does the system respond?

At its heart, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects - like the show itself, and the entirety of Antonelli's work - is the essence of what true curation is: Context, conscience, cultural curiosity, and, above all, a point of view of what matters in the world and why.
Exhibition images and image captions courtesy of MoMA

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Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects

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It is a privilege to have someone in your life who is both a good friend and a personal hero. I'm fortunate to count among those rare gifts MoMA Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli - design oracle, crusader for humanized technology, curious octopus - whose shows continue to define and redefine design, expanding our understanding of it not only as a creative discipline but also as a cultural translator, social lubricant, and "interface between progress and humanity."

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It is a privilege to have someone in your life who is both a good friend and a personal hero. I'm fortunate to count among those rare gifts MoMA Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli - design oracle, crusader for humanized technology, curious octopus - whose shows continue to define and redefine design, expanding our understanding of it not only as a creative discipline but also as a cultural translator, social lubricant, and "interface between progress and humanity." Her latest exhibition, titled , which ran between July 24th and November 7th, 2011, explored with an unparalleled blend of excitement and insight the evolving communication between people and objects - a relationship all the more palpable, quite literally so, in our age of ubiquitous sensors and data feeds and interfaces, yet still rooted in our inextricable and increasingly complex relationship with the physicality of the analog world.

Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects (public library) is itself a meta-object in the exhibition - exquisitely produced and thoughtfully constructed to contextualize and illuminate the nearly 200 projects in the show, this analog artifact flows beautifully and seamlessly into the digital and mechanical world it encapsulates. An embossed faux-pixelated cover invites you to touch the "interface" of the book. On many of the pages, QR codes let you leap into a specific project's digital presence. The Cubitt Fax computerizes the printed page, exuding a kind of binary intimacy.

Antonelli writes in the introductory essay:

The bond between people and things has always been filled with powerful and unspoken sentiments going well beyond functional expectations and including attachment, love, possessiveness, jealousy, pride, curiosity, anger, even friendship and partnership.

And, indeed, the projects and objects featured span the entire spectrum of human intellectual and emotional investment. From the unapologetically analog and deeply personal, like Stefanie Posavec's handmade visualizations and Nicholas Felton's infographic life reports, to the widely exploratory and the wildly futuristic, like Christien Meindertsma's brilliant PIG O5049 project and Daisy Ginsberg's E.chromi "designer bacteria," the works cover (and uncover) interfaces, tools, devices, data visualization, video games, websites, and many more facets of this curious cultural shift we are witnessing, exploring the intersection and interplay of these various conduits of communication.

Talk to Me is also very much about locating the present:

In contrast to the twentieth-century triumph of semiotics, which looked down on communication as nothing but a mechanical transmission of coded meaning, the twenty-first century has begun as one of pancommunication - everything and everybody conveying content and meaning in all possible combinations, from one-on-one to everything-to-everybody. We now expect objects to communicate, a cultural shift made evident when we see children searching for buttons or sensors on a new object, even when the object has no batteries or plug.

Antonelli's talent for bridging the esoteric with the universal shines throughout:

In our relationship with objects, as in any relationship, indifference is the worst offense and laziness the worst sin.

Citing Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick and his five axioms of communication, defined in 1967, Paola examines how our paradigms of idea-transmission have both changed and remained the same half a century later:

The first axiom tells us, 'One cannot not communicate.' Any kind of gesture, behavior, and attitude can and will be interpreted as communication. In e-mail, for example, responding immediately to a message creates a particular subtext, as does not responding at all; a congratulatory message sent 'reply all' can be interpreted as displaying presence and authority or else insecurity, and an ill-advised response by a person who received only a blind copy reveals...something else.

The third axiom says, 'The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners' communication procedures.' Communication, Watzlawick posits, is cyclical, with each partner believing that he or she is simply responding to the other; some of the most common problems of the digital era arise from the cycle of amplification and reaction that marks our text exchanges, something that serial e-mail gaffers and awkward users will be familiar with. The problem is acute enough to require the invention of ToneCheck, developed by Lymbix, an emotional spell-check for e-mail messages that alerts the writer to excessive displays of anger, sadness, or insensitivity.

In the introductory essay, Antonelli also exercises her remarkable gift for explaining technical terminology and complex systems in layman language that takes none of the substance away, breaking down the four main design disciplines covered in the show:

Communication design focuses on delivering messages, and it encompasses most graphic design, signage, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design, which is sometimes brought under the more generic and functionalist rubric of user-experience design, delineates the behavior of products and systems, as well as the experience that people will have with them. Information or visualization design includes the maps, diagrams, and visualization tools that filter and make sense of the enormous amount of information that is more widely available than ever before. Critical design is one of the most promising and far-reaching new areas of study, using conceptual scenarios built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors. Its disciples are experts in 'What if?'

More than anything, Talk to Me is about both challenging and owning design as a centripetal force of culture:

Talk to Me is an opportunity to anchor design's new dimension and highlight innovative interfaces that can inform designers in the future. Whether they use the skin and shell of objects as an interface or animate them from within, designers are using the whole world to communicate and are set on a path that is transforming it into an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.

[...]

It might seem that design has abandoned its tested, grounded, functionalist territory to venture into an ambiguous universe where its essence is confused and a crisis of identity arises - is the 5th Dimensional Camera art or scientific modeling? Is Humeau's work creative paleontology? Are Sputniko!'s devices contributing to interpretive anthropology? Is Pachube mere coding and infrastructure engineering? Not at all. I claim them, with their powerful vision and their focus on knowledge and awareness, as design, and I praise their radical functionalism. Ambiguity and ambivalence - the ability to inhabit different environments and frames of mind at the same time - have become central to our cultural development. They are qualities that embody the openness and flexibility necessary for embracing diversity, and they are critical to the questioning and imagining that are the preferred methods of inquiry. Communication is at the nexus of all these necessary human features: the most critical function of design today.

Several essays by prominent cross-disciplinary thinkers contextualize the various thematic sections. In one titled "Reality Is Plenty, Thanks: Twelve Arguments for Keeping the Naked Eye Naked," the always-thoughtful Kevin Slavin asks:

As parlor tricks go, [virtual reality] is a neat one. Reality is built on human perception, entering consciousness through the human eye. If you add to the stack, you have something like reality, only more. But more what?

In another essay, "Conversations with the Network," Khoi Vinh observes:

The designer as author, as craftsperson bringing together beginning, middle, and end, becomes redundant in a space in which every participant forges his or her own beginning, middle, and end. And that is exactly what happens in networked media. The narrative recedes, and the behavior of the design solution becomes prominent. What becomes important are questions that concern not the author but the users. How does the system respond to the input of its users? When a user says something to the system, how does the system respond?

At its heart, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects - like the show itself, and the entirety of Antonelli's work - is the essence of what true curation is: Context, conscience, cultural curiosity, and, above all, a point of view of what matters in the world and why.
Exhibition images and image captions courtesy of MoMA

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Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It is a privilege to have someone in your life who is both a good friend and a personal hero. I'm fortunate to count among those rare gifts MoMA Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli - design oracle, crusader for humanized technology, curious octopus - whose shows continue to define and redefine design, expanding our understanding of it not only as a creative discipline but also as a cultural translator, social lubricant, and "interface between progress and humanity."

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Challenge

We conduct self-initiated studies to understand emerging attitudes, generations, tribes or to deep dive on categories. We noticed some interesting trends in the world of beauty and wanted to understand what the future looked like for the sector. The Future of Beauty project is a Foresight-led speculative exploration which converges trend forecasting and emergent behaviour insight with scenario planning and design futures.

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Insights

Inspired by a global network of beauty progressives, early adopters, influencers and experts, we witnessed the dawning of new beauty behaviours. All of which were being enabled, adapted and accelerated by emerging technologies.

We have a kit of Foresight tools which we use to deliver accuracy; multiple lenses through which we can view our clients' complex business challenges to create clarity. Some of them assist us in better understanding the market and brand opportunity, whereas others help us identify new needs and behaviours. We drew on our constantly evolving Trend Bank (currently there are over 200 live trends) which inspire us to find new directions, build creative hypotheses and identify consumer tribes and personas. We also engaged with our Progressive Network: people demonstrating signals of emerging trends, living lifestyles of tomorrow, today. This is a very powerful tool to ground our hypotheses in real behaviours and attitudes.

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Outcome

By extrapolating and transposing insights into speculative scenarios, we developed an insightful and inspiring capture of our study. We used this resource to share our knowledge and expertise at numerous global conferences and thought leadership platforms. It was also of great interest to the key global beauty brands, right through to small start-ups, looking to rock the market with innovation and new approaches.

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Our insight also provided creative fuel to our teams, who went on to devise a trio of design concepts to provoke conversations about possible and preferable futures. Identité is a personalised skincare system, adapted to meet dynamic needs and behaviours, delivered direct to consumers. Eléver is an AI-enabled skincare printer capable of replicating the latest looks in an instant. Atmosphère is a device which challenges the psychological and physiological stresses of urban living by creating a cleansing and calming beauty bubble.

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The Future of Beauty project is a Foresight-led speculative exploration which converges trend forecasting and emergent behaviour insight with scenario planning and design futures.

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An overview of contemporary speculative practice - SpeculativeEdu

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SpeculativeEdu is an educational, project funded by ERASMUS+, the European Union programme for education, training, youth, and sport, with the aim of strengthening speculative design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience whilst developing new methods in the field of speculative design.

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In recent years, designers have welcomed a variety of approaches to creating new technologies. From social science research methods, to scientific styles of inquiry, to engineering-based models for problem-solving, designers can choose from a variety of ways to tackle any design challenge.

One approach that has gained momentum in recent years is speculative design. Popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in their book , the speculative design movement sparked an interest in critical and imaginative methods for design. The introduction of Speculative Everything Speculative Everything in 2013 coincided with a burst of new consumer technologies and the rapid integration of new products and services into our daily lives.

With so many possibilities for new consumer technologies, we as designers need to continually ask, Is this the reality we want? How might we shape our future through the products and services we create?

Speculative design provides a framework for asking these critical questions. It allows designers to imagine what the future might look like if different solutions were adopted. It provides designers with the tools to speculate upon social, ethical, and political implications of new technologies.

What is speculative design?

The core question asked within speculative design is, "What if...?"

With speculative design, we start by asking, Is this a good idea? Before asking, How do we make it happen?

In their book, Dunne & Raby believe that auto shows can take the speculative element further by demonstrating how different concept vehicles could impact the way people move in a future ecosystem.

With speculative design, we start by asking, Is this a good idea? Before asking, How do we make it happen?

A concept vehicle design.

The future is full of possibilities

Futures are central to speculative design . Within this context, the future is seen as a range of possibilities. Futures can be characterized as probable, plausible, possible, and impossible , depending on the likelihood of it occurring.

A time horizon of ten years (the near future) is considered ideal for speculative design. According to Phil Balagtas, founder of the Design Futures Initiative, if we project too far into the future, we're more likely to end up with mere speculation. At the other end of the spectrum, if we stay too close to the present, our predictions would have to be thoroughly and critically researched. Speculative design, therefore, exists somewhere in between.

In recent years, designers have welcomed a variety of approaches to creating new technologies. From social science research methods, to scientific styles of inquiry, to engineering-based models for problem-solving, designers can choose from a variety of ways to tackle any design challenge.

One approach that has gained momentum in recent years is speculative design. Popularized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in their book , the speculative design movement sparked an interest in critical and imaginative methods for design. The introduction of Speculative Everything Speculative Everything in 2013 coincided with a burst of new consumer technologies and the rapid integration of new products and services into our daily lives.

With so many possibilities for new consumer technologies, we as designers need to continually ask, Is this the reality we want? How might we shape our future through the products and services we create?

Speculative design provides a framework for asking these critical questions. It allows designers to imagine what the future might look like if different solutions were adopted. It provides designers with the tools to speculate upon social, ethical, and political implications of new technologies.

What is speculative design?

The core question asked within speculative design is, "What if...?"

With speculative design, we start by asking, Is this a good idea? Before asking, How do we make it happen?

In their book, Dunne & Raby believe that auto shows can take the speculative element further by demonstrating how different concept vehicles could impact the way people move in a future ecosystem.

With speculative design, we start by asking, Is this a good idea? Before asking, How do we make it happen?

A concept vehicle design.

The future is full of possibilities

Futures are central to speculative design . Within this context, the future is seen as a range of possibilities. Futures can be characterized as probable, plausible, possible, and impossible , depending on the likelihood of it occurring.

A time horizon of ten years (the near future) is considered ideal for speculative design. According to Phil Balagtas, founder of the Design Futures Initiative, if we project too far into the future, we're more likely to end up with mere speculation. At the other end of the spectrum, if we stay too close to the present, our predictions would have to be thoroughly and critically researched. Speculative design, therefore, exists somewhere in between.

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Embracing unforeseeable futures: A look at speculative design

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Speculative design raises thought-provoking questions about the future, and the ways in which we design and tech take part in shaping it - today.

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Over the past decade, Speculative Design has emerged as an alternative, critical and provocative form of future-oriented designerly practice. Now found in diverse settings including government, business, and even the military, Speculative Design offers designers a way to consider future possibilities from a political, ethical, and sometimes whimsical perspective. In the words of Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby who coined the term, Speculative Design pluralizes the world, loosens "reality's grip on the imagination" and thus allows designers and users to "social dream" together.

We aim with this Deep Dive to give students both a contextual understanding of the emergence and significance of Speculative Design and a few practical tools to design speculatively. We will: discuss the history, current practices and future directions of Speculative Design, read some key texts to create a shared understanding of its role and contribution, evaluate instructive examples, and design speculative artifacts.

The course is structured around a design process undertaken by students in couples. Each course day will cover one step of the design process (from worldbuilding to reflection) and provide students with both theoretical knowledge (short lectures and suggested readings) as well as practical recommendations on how to craft design speculations (design principles and instructive project critique).

Upon completion of this course, students will:

1. Become familiar with the origins, significance, and applications of Speculative Design.

2. Be able to critically analyze Speculative Design exemplars.

3. Be capable to design speculative artifacts in response to important social issues.

The course is coordinated and facilitated by dr. Maria Luce Lupetti and dr. Roy Bendor.

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Over the past decade, Speculative Design has emerged as an alternative, critical and provocative form of future-oriented designerly practice. Now found in diverse settings including government, business, and even the military, Speculative Design offers designers a way to consider future possibilities from a political, ethical, and sometimes whimsical perspective.