Speculative Design Research Articles

Metaverse Perspectives from Japan: A Participatory Speculative Design Case Study

Currently, the development of the metaverse lies in the hands of industry. Citizens have little influence on this process. Instead, to do justice to the pluralism of (digital) societies, we should strive for an open discourse including many different perspectives on the metaverse and its core technologies such as AI. We utilize a participatory speculative design (PSD) approach to explore Japanese citizens' perspectives on future metaverse societies, as well as social and ethical implications. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PSD in engaging citizens in critical discourse on emerging technologies like the metaverse by presenting our workshop framework and participants' processes. Secondly, we identify key themes from participants' perspectives, providing insights for culturally sensitive design and development of virtual environments. Our analysis shows that participants imagine the metaverse to have the potential to solve a variety of societal issues; for example, breaking down barriers of physical environments for communication, social interaction, crisis preparation, and political participation, or tackling identity-related issues. Regarding future metaverse societies, participants' imaginations raise critical questions about human-AI relations, technical solutionism, politics and technology, globalization and local cultures, and immersive technologies. We discuss implications and contribute to expanding conversations on metaverse developments.

Коммерческие ВТСП обмотки

Commercial superconducting windings must meet traditional technical requirements for electrical equipment. Among the many thousands of superconducting windings manufactured over the past six decades, not all have achieved the rated current, not all are reliably protected, and the controllability of the windings is almost never remembered. Using the example of the speculative design of the HTS winding, approaches to the implementation of these important requirements for commercial HTS windings are illustrated.

The Consortium of Celestials: Cosmic objects equitable interactions

This speculative design study presents a provocative inquiry into the idea of an equitable society, addressed through the exploration of cosmic scale and celestial object interactions. The issues of injustice occurring in current society are influenced by the lack of access to resources and opportunities, where architecture also plays a part. Using a post-humanist approach, the study speculates on the scale of society, broadening the context of civilisation to develop an equitable society. The study creates a science narrative of a cosmic-scale civilisation as the basis of the architectural scheme between celestial objects in cosmic space that interacts in an equitable way. The narratives inform systems of architectural interactions that are designed to support an equitable life system, including communication, extraction, processing, and distribution of spatial and environmental resources. Five particular scenarios are outlined to demonstrate these interactions, from scenarios of resource exchange, climate calibration, and anticipation of destruction. This study demonstrates an important discussion on how design of an equitable society can be informed by the interactions between cosmic objects, systems, and resources. In doing so, this study introduces new narrative of architecture as a form of extraterrestrial built environment, expanding the current understanding of context and its environmental limitations.

Geo-based fabrics: using earthen materials for wearables

ABSTRACT Over 50% of synthetic textiles in existence originate from polyester derived from petroleum oil. Synthetic textiles make up over 65% of global circulating textiles and the industry is known for being highly pollutant, resource wasteful, and responsible for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions annually. One prominent solution to the industry’s negative environmental impact is to develop alternative textiles for garment and architectural fabric applications. This paper presents a novel development of earth – and bio-based wearable textiles coined as BioMud Fabric which consists entirely of bio-based materials; 65% of which is clay-rich raw soil. More specifically, the material integrates raw soil with naturally occurring bio-based plastics to create a flexible, lightweight and biodegradable fabric. The research methodology includes a mix-design analysis, using electron microscopy, and a macro-scale structural characterisation using tearing tests. The final demonstrations showcase speculative design applications which serve to expand the possibilities of the material through fashion.

Examining the “unearthly archives”: Spiritualism, Psychical Research, and Psychometric Material Culture in the US and Britain

Abstract This article examines the intersection of material culture and the occult by exploring the practice of psychometry, drawing parallels between this esoteric mode of object interpretation and more conventional approaches. Coined by physician Joseph Rodes Buchanan in the 1840s, psychometry—meaning “soul or mind measurement”—is the ability of “sensitive” individuals, often women, to read an object’s electrical vibration and glean information about its history, as well as that of its owner, living or deceased. Adopted by spiritualists and psychical researchers in the United States and Britain, psychometry mediated between humans and objects, and humans and their own mortality, in the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on material culture studies, consumer studies, and histories of spiritualism and psychical research, I contextualize and compare firsthand accounts of psychometric readings with more traditional approaches to object-based inquiry to contend that psychometry is a mode of affective design historical practice, a speculative design history that relies on senses other than vision, and knowledge more intuitive than rational.

Dreaming with data: Cultivating critical consciousness in datafied living research

This paper addresses data reflexivity in terms of critical consciousness-raising by linking people’s everyday encounters with data to their speculative visions about datafied futures. We suggest everyday encounters with data about oneself might play an important role in facilitating both personal and collective imagination about data and devising future paths towards legitimate and meaningful datafied living. Lending inspiration from the figure of the researcher as critical companion and from speculative design, we posit that critical consciousness-raising is not something generated purely by way of informing people about datafication, but built from below, through people’s everyday experiences with datafying themselves and being datafied by others. Furthermore, it is deeply intertwined with datafication research itself, and the way we seek to establish links between individual and collective experiences and evaluations of data practices. Based on this, the paper offers three methodological entry points for exploring how critical consciousness can be cultivated and collectivized: longitudinal fieldwork with repeated interviews, data visualization derived from people’s own phones, and speculative workshops on future data practices.

Walking memories, future dreams: Exploring design through cartographies, speculation, and AI

This paper summarizes a design practice (“Take the Memory Out for a Future Walk”) conducted with undergraduate students in a park in Barcelona. Through walking, sensory mapping, artificial intelligence exploration, and prototyping, participants explored the interplay between embodied experiences, memory, future speculation, and design intervention. Walking the park fostered sensory engagement, shaping students’ understanding of the site and its history. This informed the development of projects addressing environmental concerns and promoting sustainable practices through reimagined spaces or objects. Students employed AI tools to generate ideas where they envisioned alternative futures and challenged existing norms. This process encouraged non-canonical reflection, urging students to move beyond conformistic approaches while fostering future-oriented critical thinking. The practice yielded valuable insights for design education. Firstly, it showed why the integrating walking and sensory mapping into design processes can challenge space determinism. In addition, it contributed to the potential of speculative design and future studies to foster alternative imagination and address pressing issues like climate change, promoting planetary awareness. Further iterations could benefit from expanding on-site exploration and incorporating material limitations to deepen student engagement with the natural surroundings, community and project sustainability.

The past and present of thought experiments’ research at Glancy: bibliometric review and analysis

In the development of physical theories, thought experiments play a crucial role. Research on this topic began in 1976 and has continued to the present. This study aims to provide a more complete picture of the progress of thought experiments over the past two decades. To achieve this, this study employs bibliometric mapping methods. A total of 679 published papers were analyzed, including articles (504), conference papers (92), and book chapters (83). This data was retrieved from the Scopus database. The study's findings reveal that research and publications on thought experiments are highly valued and have received significant attention over the past eight years. According to the findings, 90% of the top 20 source titles contributing to thought experiments are from journals in the first and second quartiles (Q1 and Q2). This quartile ranking shows the quality and significant influence of a journal. The geographical distribution indicates that the United States contributes the most to thought experiments research, with 213 documents, 2592 citations, and 47 links. We also identified several prospective keywords that could be the focus of future research, including artificial intelligence, physics education, fiction, God, theology, productive imagination, technology, speculative design, and critical design. Therefore, this study provides a thorough picture of thought experiment research trends and future directions of potential topics that can be the focus of future researchers.

Fen-Orchids, a Garden, and a Tandem in the (Post-)Jungle: Unsettling Care and Control in the European Borderscape

The purpose of this article is to unsettle and thicken the increasing attention that has recently been given to care in design research. I do this by looking to both the contents and the conditions of making a two-screen video with a tandem bicycle in the so-called “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais, northern France, and in the eco-park that replaced the camp after it was cleared. In doing so, I make two arguments. First, that care for nature in the camp is simultaneously a form of control over access to the space. Second, using the tandem as an example, I discuss a speculative approach to care that is concerned with consequences and possibilities by designing vulnerability into objects. In doing so, the article foregrounds critical approaches to care in speculative design research, conceptualizing care beyond normative assumptions of inherent “goods” to tune in to the complex and troubling political and ecological relations that certain care practices produce.

Archiving the Ephemeral in Digital Public Space: Using Speculative Design to Consider Collaborative Fan Play in the Metaverse

Looking at fan activity through the lens of play, this paper considers the archiving opportunities and challenges posed by new technology for playful ephemeral fan co-creation in multiplatform digital contexts. These include technical concerns such as platform fragility and how to capture inherent liveness and temporality, but also ethical concerns such as sustainability, consent and content moderation. To examine this, the paper takes fan-created alternate reality games (ARGs) as a particular example of such archiving challenges. It first describes a real example of such a game, ‘Blow the Man Down’ before introducing speculative design as a method to consider a potential future where emerging technologies such as the metaverse and artificial intelligence form part of online collaborative play and how it is archived. A speculative design scenario is presented where players can choose to recreate the experience of initial interactive play either as a dream-like replaying of the original player choices, or as a branching experience where a new story and experience is created each time; an ever evolving and updating archontic text. In such a context we can then consider, is archiving possible, or even desirable?

Lost in the logistical funhouse: speculative design as synthetic media enterprise

Lost in the logistical funhouse: speculative design as synthetic media enterprise

The future of presence in distance learning, a speculative design approach

Face-to-face teaching remains for many teachers the golden standard in education. However, learning is always emergent, dependent on the socio-material context. Sharing a physical space is one option, but with new digital technologies, alternative assemblages can create new and exciting learning environments and experiences. Based on the community of inquiry model, I consider cognitive, social, and teaching presence as central to a valuable educational experience in higher education. The aim of this research is to look at what presence could look like in the distance university of the future. Traditional research methods, whether quantitative or qualitative, focus on what is and on linear causal effects. However, education is open, recursive, nonlinear, and new environments introduce new actors, human and material, that affect the learning and teaching. In this research, I experiment with a speculative design method to see if it can lead to opening up new possibilities and to their critical evaluation. In six speculative design workshops, teachers developed prototypes of what presence and affective closeness could look like when students and teachers were spatially and temporally distant. I present the three main categories of prototypes that answer the needs of distance teaching creating social interactions, offering feedback, or re-creating a virtual classroom. These all show how presence can be enacted at a distance, including asynchronously. From a science-based and data-driven approach to the Virtual Reality University, via a live course map and the connected coffee cup, each prototype offers a different view of education with its opportunities, but also challenges. The prototypes also highlight how difficult it is to change our perception of what presence could look like in higher education. I use Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to help explain the difficulty of moving away from the face-to-face experience, and how a revolutionary view rather than a marginal approach to change requires a return to the fundamental questions of how students learn, the purpose of education and the role of the teacher.

Improving the shelter design process via a shelter assessment matrix

Millions are living in shelters around the world, often for decades. Architects are rarely trained in shelter design and as a result speculative designs are frequently impractical or insensitive to occupants. In addition, aid agency staff can lack engineering or architectural knowledge, so need support during shelter procurement. Evidence gathered by the authors in seven countries over three years revealed poor conditions within many shelters, including condensation, excessive temperatures, lack of privacy and poor air quality, all of which contribute to increased morbidity and mortality. To address this, the paper proposes a design assessment platform, the Shelter Assessment Matrix (SAM), covering 34 issues. SAM also includes guidance documents that allow users to upskill themselves on a range of topics. The tool was tested in three ways: (i) 11 agency staff were asked to assess the same shelter. The mean score was 45.7/100, standard deviation (SD) 2.96. The narrow SD indicated that SAM provided consistent scoring. (ii) 187 previously deployed shelters were evaluated and scored between 27 and 78. This suggests that SAM generates a range of scores, and that shelters could be improved. This evaluation also provides the first contextualised performance analysis of shelters around the world, and a repository for others to judge their designs against. (iii) Use of the platform resulted in considerable measured uplifts in building science and cultural knowledge. SAM has been made freely available online and has been used by agencies to materially improve the design of shelters for thousands of individuals in four countries.

Teaching speculative design

Teaching speculative design

Return to Reality: Speculative Design of Interaction Ritual Chains and Exploration of Alone Together

“Alone together” is an ever-changing “wicked problem.” In this research and practice, the author tries to combine experience design, referring to the theory of “interaction ritual chain theory,” and creatively add interactive experience to discursive works, so that the audience can think between the real and the virtual.

Exploring the Roles of Artifacts in Speculative Futures: Perspectives in HCI

In an era where technology increasingly blurs the boundaries between humans and machines, artifacts have become crucial mediums for critically examining the technological, social, and ethical dimensions of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). This study explores artifacts as a key yet underutilized medium for speculation in the evolving field of HCI from a systemic perspective. While artifacts increasingly enable HCI to move beyond optimizing user experiences towards critically and collaboratively envisioning futures, perspectives comprehensively examining artifacts across the speculative design process and their impacts remain limited. Through a literature review of 53 speculative artifacts within the scope of HCI, this research elucidates the roles of artifacts across intention, making, and impact. Four categories of speculative artifacts emerged—Reflective, Exploratory, Interventional, and Heuristic—demonstrating how artifacts employ material, ambiguous, functional, and provocative forms to shape experiences, behaviors, and social norms. This study highlights the need for HCI to increasingly recognize the capacity of artifacts to support critical, sustained, participatory speculation by providing tangible representations of alternative futures. Speculative artifacts thus serve as powerful mediums to engage in societal discourse around the ethics and values of emerging technologies and to envision and enact responsible innovation. The materialization of alternative futures through artifacts allows researchers to reimagine socio-technological relationships, pushing design into inclusive, controversial spaces where diverse stakeholders can collaboratively shape desired and undesired futures.

Narratives of Blended Experience

Abstract This paper focuses on interaction across and between the physical/digital divide. We use blending theory to design for these situations, otherwise known as conceptual integration. Initially, this paper offers a discussion of the literature around blends. From this literature, we applied Benyon’s (Benyon, 2014) proposition of conceptual integration in mixed reality spaces (Blended Spaces) to consider interactions with the digital that complement the physical. We investigated blended spaces in partnership with undergraduate students during a live theatre festival. Our collaborators designed applications that applied blending principles, employing techniques drawn from speculative design. Outputs consist of speculative, narrative storyboards that use data gathered directly from stakeholder interviews and over 380 festival visitors. Our work led us to propose reworking Blended Spaces into a model that novice designers could easily conceive and apply. The work we conducted highlighted the need to consider user transitions from physical to digital and back again and highlighted the experiential nature of this type of interaction.

Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry

To analyze potential negative consequences of adopting generative AI solutions in the digital afterlife industry (DAI), in this paper we present three speculative design scenarios for AI-enabled simulation of the deceased. We highlight the perspectives of the data donor, data recipient, and service interactant – terms we employ to denote those whose data is used to create ‘deadbots,’ those in possession of the donor’s data after their death, and those who are meant to interact with the end product. We draw on the scenarios to map out several key ethical concerns posed by ‘re-creation services’ and to put forward recommendations on the ethical development of AI systems in this specific area of application. The recommendations, targeted at providers of AI-enabled re-creation services, include suggestions for developing sensitive procedures for retiring deadbots, ensuring meaningful transparency, restricting access to such services to adult users only, and adhering to the principle of mutual consent of both data donors and service interactants. While we suggest practical solutions to the socio-ethical challenges posed by the emergence of re-creation services, we also emphasize the importance of ongoing interdisciplinary research at the intersection of the ethics of AI and the ethics of the DAI.

Using speculative methods to challenge the invisibility and inevitability of data in education

Speculation is a resource for critical analysis of data-driven postdigital education. In particular, speculative methods help researchers challenge the invisibility of data-driven educational practices, and thereby unsettle the apparent inevitability of data futures. Working against these tendencies towards invisibility and inevitability requires critical imagination, and speculative methods help foster this for researchers and participants. This paper introduces speculative methods and explores their enactment in a research project that examined the social and ethical implications of datafication in higher education. Speculative methods are characterised by their non-representational, complexity-informed and inventive character and their temporal, epistemological and performative qualities. They have a complex relationship with time and temporality, attending to ‘not-yetness’; are epistemologically complex, producing problems and engaging with ambiguity; and act to create futures or realities they represent, in part through engaging publics at different scales and in different contexts. Methods inspired variously by speculative fiction and speculative design approaches have been used by digital education researchers to investigate and intervene in data futures and to challenge predictive, closed forms of data-driven future-making. The methodological value of speculation is explored here through discussion of a research project that involved ethnographic and speculative engagement with students at a research intensive university in Scotland. The research attempted to understand participants’ experiences of and perspectives on emerging data-driven technologies and practices, and what this meant for their relationship with the university. In this paper we analyse the design of and data generated through two particular speculative methods: data walking, and thinking otherwise. We focus on participants’ reflections on the methods used and show how speculation was central to efforts to prompt ethical reflection on data-driven practices. In the case of data walking, this involved sensitising participants to datafication processes, thereby making hidden practices visible to participants. A simple prompt to think otherwise, meanwhile, generated data regarding participants’ experiences and problems in the present while at the same time opening up possibilities of thinking otherwise about data futures. We close by relating these findings to wider considerations for speculative methods, focusing on the role of speculative objects as both instrument and output of research and exploring the significance of discursive closures in participatory research.

A generative toolkit to help raise industrial design students’ awareness of low metal recycling rates

AbstractEducation for Sustainable Development requires raising individuals' awareness of problems relevant to the environment. We designed a Generative Toolkit that supports industrial design students carrying out a Speculative Design task and through this process initiates greater problem awareness of low metal recycling rates. In this paper we give insights into the Toolkit's theoretical derivation and the design process. Findings from testing suggest that there are several opportunities for improvement, such as considering further content-related competencies in the Toolkit's design.