Speculating with Care: Learning from an Experimental Educational Program in the West Bank

Abstract

In 2012, I was involved in the experimental study program, Campus in Camps, which is located in the West Bank and which brought together 15 third-generation refugees to study the contemporary condition of Palestinian refugee camps and to speculate about their potential futures. In this article, I draw on my experience at Campus in Camps in order to reflect on how design and speculation can be activated by designers and non-designers to speculate with care about the matters of their own lives. To explore the potential held by the design speculations produced at Campus in Camps, I draw on the work of feminist philosopher Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa around “matters of care”. To think about the aspects of care and speculation activated throughout the different phases of the educational program, I mobilise Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphor that compares speculation to the flight of an airplane.