Speculative Design Research Articles

Transforming perspectives on gender through imagined futures: A speculative design inquiry

This paper will present a second-year Fashion Design Theory project, ‘Imagining Gender Equality in 100 Years’. The project outcomes were based on the critical design approach of speculative design (SD), exploring the intersectional issues of gender relevant to a South African context. SD thrives on imagination to create scenarios that change perspectives, beliefs, and values related to social problems. The following questions were posed to the students in developing the project guidelines. Firstly, what will the change in values, beliefs, and attitudes related to issues of gender look like in the future? And how can students use design to imagine spaces in the present for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being in an imagined future? With the application of action research, the paper discusses and analyses a selection of student projects completed in 2020 and 2021. In doing this, the paper aims to reflect on the transformation of a design theory assessment by applying critical design approaches culminating in creative and conceptual outcomes for complex life problems. In addition, reflections and lessons learnt on the blended teaching and learning methods amidst Covid-19 will be imparted.

(No) Hope for the future? A design agenda for rewidening and rewilding higher education with utopian imagination

This article argues for exploring, connecting, and applying utopian imagination, speculative design, and planetary thinking as a way forward for higher education to reimagine and move towards more hopeful planetary futures. It examines hopepunk and solarpunk perspectives on possible futures to propose a design agenda for rewidening and rewilding higher education and educational technology with utopian imagination. Firstly, the article outlines and develops a framework for wider and wilder futures in higher education, emerging from utopian thinking and desire. Secondly, it connects hopepunk with speculative design and solarpunk with planetary design to highlight and put forward rebellious strategies of hope in envisioning more preferable futures. Thirdly, it approaches the field of educational technology within the context of wide and wild education to establish four planetary orientations concerning educational technology: Higher Education for, in, with, and by the world. Taken together, the article proposes a design agenda for educational technology that integrates utopian imagination and solarpunk practices with planetary educational technology to catalyse the development of more preferable futures in a more-than-human world.

Design: Episteme and Doxa. Co-design as an Opportunity to Share Choices

This paper delves into the concept of co-design, a collaborative approach involving stakeholders in the conceptualization and design phases to understand diverse perspectives and jointly define project directions. Examining the relationships between co-design, Design Thinking, and user-centred design, the paper emphasises distinctions in their goals and methods. It addresses potential biases in co-design processes, providing strategies to mitigate analogical relations, cognitive effort minimization, and emotional influences. Epistemological reflections highlight the efficacy of participatory methods in generating theoretical hypotheses while underscoring the need for evidence-based validation. The article explores co-design’s applications in speculative design and ludo-didactics (game design). In speculative design, co-design aids in framing problems and generating plausible contextualizations, while in game design, participatory processes, particularly playtesting, enhance the exploratory and refinement phases. The paper suggests avenues for further research, emphasising the strategic placement of Co-design processes in project phases, considering potential biases, and exploring its application in disruptive innovation contexts.

Using Speculative Design to Understand Preferred Futures for the Design and Use of Tracking Data in U.S. College Sport Teams

US college sports teams are increasingly adopting personal data technologies, such as wearable sensors, with a goal of improving individual and team performance as well as individual safety. These tools can also reinforce the power that coaches hold over student-athletes and compromise student-athletes' needs for privacy and agency. To investigate preferred, and anti-preferred, approaches for navigating this complex sociotechnical challenge, we used a speculative design approach in which student athletes and technology design students developed three videos that portray tensions between student-athletes and coaches around the use of sports tracking technologies. We then shared these videos with 15 participants including student-athletes, coaches, and designers. Drawing on the perspectives of student-athletes, team staff, and designers embedded in the videos and expressed in reaction to the videos, we describe preferences for boundaries on tracking and sharing, how tracking data represent athletes, and for data practices. We also propose design requirements and recommendations for use to better align tracking technologies with these preferences.

Design Tensions in Online Freelancing Platforms: Using Speculative Participatory Design to Support Freelancers' Relationships with Clients

This paper explores the design challenges that arise in supporting online freelancers to navigate relationships with clients. Prior studies have shown that current platform designs can lead to worker precarity in freelancer-client relationships, such as power imbalances, information asymmetry, and labor abuse. To envision alternative designs that empower workers in managing their relationships with clients, we engaged 22 Upwork freelancers in participatory speculative design activities. Through this co-design process, we identified design tensions that constrain design options as a result of conflicting values and priorities that could only be balanced and compromised rather than completely resolved. Six design tensions were identified in the context of designing for four different phases of freelancing. We observed three patterns in these tensions: 1) the freelancers' need for client involvement in their tasks and career growth, which conflicted with their skepticism that clients had sufficient incentives to be involved; 2) that there was often no viable balancing option for some tensions, but they could be addressed through changes in the platform's incentive structure; and 3) some tensions occurred not only between freelancers and clients, but also within the freelancer community. We present three approaches for addressing these design tensions and discuss how this research can support more equitable and healthy freelancer-client relationships.

Ecologies Otherwise: Mapping Ontological, Speculative, and Transition Design Discourses

This paper examines three emergent theories of design that situate ecological change within paradigm shifts: namely ontological design, speculative design, and transition design. Using Foucault’s quadrilateral approach to analyzing discursive formations, it is argued that each theory of design offers a qualitative reframing of the primary problem underlying ecological crisis: respectively, the designed object, imaginative constraint, and systemic issues. In light of each unique orientation to ecological crisis, these three theories advance new ways of designing: redirecting practice in pursuit of more sustainable futures; engaging audiences in hypothetical questions about what might be; or re-envisioning new lifestyles through continuous systemic shift. In analyzing the difference within and between each theoretical discourse, this paper contributes to ecological dialogue in design, offering designers a map of dynamic approaches for reframing and responding to complex ecological issues.

Aesthetic In-Access: Notes from the CripTech Metaverse Lab

Abstract Metaverse technologies, such as spatial audio, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR), present new possibilities for disabled artists. To explore how artists use metaverse technologies—as well as the frictions that inhibit access—the authors describe the events of CripTech Metaverse Lab, which invited a cohort of disabled artists to a three-day workshop featuring metaverse experiences and a speculative design lab. Observing how participants creatively navigated these encounters, the authors introduce “aesthetic in-access” as a shared praxis developed by disabled users that transforms barriers to access into artistic expression. In doing so, the authors outline a metaverse future that centers disabled people’s expression and joy.

Designing for playful mobilities

ABSTRACT In this paper we consider how playful mobilities mediate and augment the power to transform the everyday and support a playful engagement with the city through design. Like other forms of mobility, playful mobilities is embodied; it involves multiple interactions with bodies, and different forms of movement within and through space. Drawing from playful mobilities, this paper explores how play can inform design decisions to compel action and affect, and offers insight into the nexus between playful mobilities and speculative design interventions. It draws on mobile autoethnography diaries focusing on e-scootering, cycling, and playing Pokémon Go to highlight how play orientates our bodies with our environment and others. Along with the site and precedent analysis, the autoethnography diary entries become the base for a series of speculative designs situated in Wellington, New Zealand. The design speculations couple playful mobilities and the materialities of designed interventions, making tangible the intersection between designing for mobile situations and potential atmosphere to enrich space and experience that take place along journeys.

Entangled Co-Design with a Trickster: Speculative Framing and Reframing

Speculative design, as a diverse set of methods that aim to offer critique, can be challenging to engage productively. In this design case, we share how a prior, stalled design project—an ambitious vision of interdisciplinary design education partnered with business and housing development projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico—provided compelling precedent as we sought to reframe during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recognized that solution-focused ways of working in the prior project left the design problem undefined. As we began the design work detailed in this case, we leveraged the perspectives and design knowledge of our interdisciplinary team of faculty and students. While design cases often emphasize the designed training or program, we focus on our reframing process, sharing vignettes as we prepared to and participated in activities at a design workshop, and then used our own design practices to engage in problem framing workshops. In sharing these accounts, we characterize the pandemic as a trickster and speculative co-designer, who revealed much about how our efforts were entangled with institutional structures. Across these punctuated vignettes of design work, we highlight how an initial broad problem frame invited this trickster to participate and how the application of problem framing tools wrested framing agency from the trickster. Collectively, this anchored our attention to systemic inequities in ways that troubled notions of sustainability.

What if Walter Gropius were a Woman: Alternative Design History Teaching Experiment

AbstractAs one of the most literary and transdisciplinary cultural practices, speculative design has become one of the best mediums for discussing emerging technologies, the Anthropocene and the ecological crisis. When design history is merely perceived as established knowledge about the past and fails to engage in dialogue with reality or individual interaction, it often struggles to inspire students' agency in learning and willingness to deep involvement in research. Alternative design history, however, serves as a type and method of historiography that actively constructs history and alternatively imagines the past. It aims to situate historical knowledge as the context for design problem exploration rather than an end goal of education. This approach guides educators and learners to co‐speculate on historical design knowledge. By ‘reversing’ specific elements of historical experience, such as gender mentioned in this article, and employing alternative imagination to form what‐if scenarios and pose inquiries about existing historical facts, a distinct form of ‘counterfactual history’ emerges that diverges notably from traditional design history. Throughout speculation within ‘counterfactual history’, students can distinguish between historical facts and realities, which enables students to comprehend the construction of historical knowledge, the individuality of historical narratives, and the standpoint of historical discourse. In this way, it helps students cultivate a historical interest that ‘starts from the self’, guiding them to foster resilient historical thinking and a critical awareness of reality.

Exploring value dilemmas of brain monitoring technology through speculative design scenarios

In the field of brain monitoring, the advancement of more user-friendly wearable and non-invasive devices is introducing new opportunities for application outside the lab and clinical use. Despite the growing importance of responsible innovation, there remains a knowledge gap in addressing the possible impacts of wearable non-invasive brain monitoring technology on mental health and well-being. Addressing this, our main aim was to study the use of speculative design scenarios as a method to describe potential value dilemmas associated with this new technology. Through a qualitative study, we invited participants to engage in discussions regarding three variations of wearable non-invasive brain monitoring technology presented in speculative video scenarios. The study's findings describe how the discussions contribute towards promoting heuristics that can help foster more responsible innovation by identifying norms and value dilemmas through inclusive speculative design practices. This qualitative case study contributes to the literature on responsible innovation by demonstrating how responsible innovation frameworks can benefit from incorporating anticipatory speculative design methods aimed at early identification of potential value dilemmas.

In conversation with ghosts: towards a hauntological approach to decolonial design for/with AI practices

ABSTRACT This is a critique of how designers deal with temporality in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critique, we reject the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing, as design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms. To make these issues visible, we dissect the Futures Cone model used in speculative design. As an alternative, the paper then presents hauntology as a vocabulary that can aid designers in accommodating pluriversal histories in anticipatory futures and reorienting their speculative tools. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, the paper highlights examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasizes the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, ones that engage with states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, the paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies.

Too Futuristic and Unnatural?: A Speculative Design Approach to the Issue of Citizen Acceptance of Urban Vertical Farming

Too Futuristic and Unnatural?: A Speculative Design Approach to the Issue of Citizen Acceptance of Urban Vertical Farming

From care practices to speculative vignettes-design considerations for robots in good care.

The care sector has become one of the test beds for developing robotic technologies, which have been promised to mitigate problems with aging populations and labor shortages. Despite these promises, the practical application of such technologies have been met with limited success. Apart from technical limitations, other challenges exist in the way we approach designing these technologies. Critical to the development in the care sector is understanding the complexity of the contexts, the needs and goals of diverse actors, and how these are socio-materially scaffolded. This paper presents a study conducted at the intersection of a value sensitive design and speculative design to understand these sensitivities. Based on the data collected in interviews (n = 6) and card workshops (n = 6) from care workers and residents in mobile care and care home contexts in Austria, we developed five themes capturing situated practices and understandings of good care as built on trust-developing routines, negotiations between different actors, affective and reciprocal dimension of care, care worker self-care, and material mediations. Subsequently, we created six speculative vignettes which serve as rhetorical devices to emphasize the tensions that arise with any technological intervention entering and reshaping existing care practices and relations. We argue that our approach can support robot designers to develop a rich understanding of the values and tensions in the specific context under study from the before design and development begin.

Using Model Cards for ethical reflection on machine learning models: an interview-based study

How do tools designed for documenting machine learning models contribute to developers’ ethical reflection? We set out to answer this question regarding Model Cards, a tool proposed for such purpose. We conducted a thematic analysis of eight semi-structured interviews based on speculative design sessions. Each participant assumed the role of developer of an artificial intelligence model in one of two scenarios: loan applications or university admissions. We found evidence that designers may have been selective about which ethical issues – from among those they had reflected on – they recorded in the Model Cards. While participants were hesitant to grant full autonomy to the artifact to be developed, we identified they still tended to rely on a third party (outside the design team) to mediate the relationship between the system and other stakeholders. Our findings contribute to our understanding of documentation tools, their epistemic value, and how they can be leveraged to engage in a more ethically informed design process of artificial intelligence systems.

HACK YOUR AGE: OLDER ADULTS AS PROVOCATIVE AND SPECULATIVE IOT CO-DESIGNERS

This research explores whether the co-design of provocative prototypes with older adults can scaffold critical thought concerning ethics, trustworthiness, security and privacy of age-oriented Internet of Things (IoT) products and services, and associated data-driven technologies (DDT). By inviting 15 adults defining themselves as ‘experiencing or anticipating old age’ to co-design IoT and DDT which addressed their hopes and fears for the future, we encouraged them to imagine a revolution in ‘technology for aging’. Three workshops utilized theatre and design research approaches including speculative design (Dunne, 2013) and co-design of provocative prototypes and social design fiction (Pilling, 2019), to stimulate discussion around imagined futures for aging and technology. Participants modelled the internet as they understood and imagined it. They were then introduced to sensors, actuators and machine learning through interactive demonstrations. Four randomly formed groups ideated ways these technologies could be applied to earlier identified hopes and fears for the future of aging. Creative technologists then created prototypes of these ideas over two weeks of feedback and iteration with participants. Participants wrote and performed performances incorporating these prototypes, which explored cybersecurity and cyberharm (Agrafiotis, 2019). Six participants also partook in post-workshop semi-structured interviews. Methods developed in this research scaffolded critical thought concerning the ethics, trustworthiness, security and privacy of age oriented IoT, and associated DDT, regardless of experience or existing knowledge. Participants found it easy to interrogate the ethics, privacy and security of their speculations because, while they may not have been technically scalable or feasible, they understood them.

Co-Creation of Sustainable Tourism and Hospitality Experiences: Education and Organizations in Search of New Business Models

Sustainability is and will be very closely linked to the development of tourism in the future. It is the most important trend shaping the sector, and it will continue to determine travelers’ preferences and motivations in the period after COVID-19. It is important that tourism destinations and the stakeholders work together to enhance their resources sustainably through valuing the socio-cultural authenticity of communities, preserving biodiversity, and also ensuring the social well-being and economic security of destinations. Destinations need to work closely with entrepreneurs to better understand their current challenges. Investment in sustainable practices and products must be part of the new business models and provide competitive advantages for all stakeholders. The time we are living in is crucial, and it is a unique opportunity to rethink the sector from the perspective of a more sustainable, safer, and technological future that favors a circular economy model. This work follows the development of a methodology using the Demola Model, collaborated by a higher education institution and a hotel, to seek an investment in a new product driven by a clear commitment to sustainability. With a methodology composed of the application of different tools, namely design research, observations/visits, interviews, benchmarking, speculative design, future scenarios, among others, we have sought to understand the main markets and contexts around the world and explore alternative opportunities and action plans. Aqua Village Health Resort & Spa (Portugal) was selected as a partner for this collaborative work. The final project presented was the creation of a restaurant linked to the sustainable concept and cooking based on fire, located on the riverbank and in the water: Aquafire—Underwater Food Experience.

Inventing Pasts and Futures Speculative Design and Media Archaeology

Inventing Pasts and Futures Speculative Design and Media Archaeology

Leading transformation in an uncertain world: A case for strategic speculative design

Strategic speculative design is an uncertainty-oriented approach to perceptually bridge today with envisioned futures through knowledge-seeking design practices such as User experience design. As such, it may complement practices for facilitating transformative change found in management theory and innovation. Despite gaining importance in design schools, strategic speculative design however remains largely unfamiliar in leadership and management research and practice. We argue that this perspective may enable more active participation and dialogue with a variety of stakeholders about forthcoming or possible transformations, which may open for new or improved construction of opportunity in the present. Our paper is conceptual and offers a new model for strategic speculative design as an organisational change method relevant for transformation leadership and discusses possible managerial implications.

Speculative ubimus design: Probing the potential for expansion of second-wave ubiquitous music frameworks

This contribution engages with the relationships between field deployments and conceptual underpinnings of ubiquitous music (ubimus) research, to establish a dialog with speculative design. Three cases serve as triggers for a conceptual exercise that points to common threads among ubimus endeavors within three active areas of second-wave ubimus investigations: Emugel, a tool for lite-coding; Ouija, an ecomprovisational artwork; and InMesh, a multimodal installation inspired in the cultural frictions of current Amazonian reality. Lite coding is proposed as a sonic-oriented practice that incorporates simplified semantic strategies to foster knowledge sharing in iterative individual and group-based creative activities. Ouija is an ecomprovisational artwork deployable on the musical internet that highlights the dynamic relationships between fixed and volatile resources in music making. The processes leading to the realization of InMesh furnish an opportunity to probe the limits of repurposed telematic tools for sharing implicit knowledge and hint at potential limitations of multimodal artistic frameworks.