Speculative Design Research Articles

Designing Eco-Effective Products: A Seeded Textile Approach

Textile production and consumption operate within a broader system that encompasses the intersections of environment, industry, and society. These intersections offer designers the opportunity to explore evolving relationships between textiles, nature, and people in order to foster eco-effective design. The product life cycle of synthetic textiles follows a linear waste path in which microplastics endure after consumption and negatively impact the environmental landscape. In line with McDonough and Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle model, this material development project explores redirecting textile “waste” in an “eco-effective” manner, as a way not only to reduce negative impacts or act neutrally on the environment, but to offer nourishment for a future growth cycle. Integrating seeds in felted wool coasters, the design challenges the linear waste narrative by aligning the textile product life cycle with a biological plant cycle. Beyond designing solely for aesthetics and for functionality as surface protection, this specific material development project adds a horticultural function into the product life cycle of coasters to support and demonstrate an eco-effective design. Furthermore, following a speculative design approach produces a visual overlap within the material itself of a home good as it is used everyday and its potential as a source of future nourishment and growth, thus actively engaging human consumers in the Cradle to Cradle process. This textile development project challenges the dominant model of production and consumption and demonstrates that products designed to work with natural cycles to support the earth and its ecosystems can support shifting the trajectory of human impact toward positive environmental interactions. The study points to the need to consider the longer-term seeded textile lifecycle as a possibility for transforming textile goods into small-scale spaces of infrastructural green development.

Before the algorithm, what's in the imagination?

This forum provides a space to engage with the challenges of designing for intelligent algorithmic experiences. We invite articles that tackle the tensions between research and practice when integrating AI and UX design. We welcome interdisciplinary debate, artful critique, forward-looking research, case studies of AI in practice, and speculative design explorations. --- Juho Kim and Henriette Cramer, Editors

Speculating on Nature, Technology and Finance. Geomerce as a Case Study for Research through Design

AbstractThis paper chronicles and reflects on the processes and the meanings of a project of speculative design that creates a narrative based on the scientific notion of phytomining, the activity of extracting metals from the soil using plants. The paper reflects on the ability of the project of bringing together people from different expertise, as a successful case study of Speculative Design and Research through Practice. Besides the scientific and technical challenges posed by GeoMerce, the authors of this paper reflect on the critical framework that set the basis for such a complex project.

Domestic drone futures

We are in the midst of a global turn to the drone. In the context of the ‘unmanning’ of contemporary life, this article explores urban drone futures as they are speculated through the under-examined sites of patents and speculative design. Approaching the drone as it is anticipated, it examines the role of speculative visualizations in the fostering and constitution of urban drone imaginations and futures. While recognising growing scholarly attention to the drone as it manifests in increasingly diverse more-than-military contexts, it argues that there remains a need to expand the methodological toolkit employed in the drone's study. Through the lenses of patents and speculative design, it calls for the diversification of both the sites through which the drone is approached, and the temporalities engaged in its critical accounting. Collectively, this article pursues an alternative political geography of the ‘domestic’ drone as it is actively imagined. It explores both the capabilities with which the anticipated drone is imbued, and the potential implications of dronified social relations and everyday life. Attending to patents and speculative design as anticipatory drone sources offers contribution to both drone geographies, drone methodologies, and political geographies of the robotic more widely.

Shifting towards non-anthropocentrism: In dialogue with speculative design futures

We are living in an earth crisis and the world at large is demanding profound change. Some researchers claim that one necessary shift to accomplish this change is that from anthropocentrism to non-anthropocentrism. This shift has, e.g., been explored in design research. This paper aims to give voice to the design processes and experiences along The Age of Entanglement project, a project in which designers collaborated with professionals from diverse fields ranging from philosophy and biology to space engineering, to further their understanding of what a shift to non-anthropocentrism might entail. As we interviewed and observed these designers in their discussions a number of thematic challenges were touched upon: How to engage with temporalities, how to collaborate productively across diverse disciplines, how to find appropriately inclusive language for expressing ideas, how to express entanglement through concrete and clear examples as well as how to maintain a productive humble and open-minded overall disposition in the designers’ sense.

Post Sonica: a speculative design project that cultivates community and sense of place within the city soundscape

There is a strong history of soundscape reverence and reflection in Utah. From Messiaen to Ussachevsky, scholars and composers alike have been inspired by the state’s sonic environment. Using these individuals’ reflective works as a muse while simultaneously incorporating R. Murray Schafer’s insights on soundscapes, I performed a sound sample study across Salt Lake City. Analyzing my samples led me to design a public installation that explores the ways in which our sonic environments affect daily life at the intersection of time, sound, and place. The concept for post sonica is a granite cylinder (4 ft. wide × 3 ft. high). Three arms rotate from the center at variable speeds in response to the strength and pitch of the sounds around them. Pads at the arms’ ends wear away separate paths in the granite base with each pass, creating the sonic “fingerprint” of a place over time. User engagement is necessarily bidirectional; as passersby are moved to interact with the device, their moment of reflection is captured and physicalized by the spinning arms. In this way, post sonica is a reminder of an urban community’s fundamental interconnectedness and the ever-present soundscape that functions as a part of it all.

Imaginary ethics: The morality of fictional aesthetics in speculative design

To effectively examine the underlying premises of emerging technology has become a major challenge to today’s design ethics. An adequate and prefigurative response to these situations requires a shift towards a fictional aesthetics that calls for co-imagination. Speculative design that sharing a similar ethical mechanism with Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic politics is worthy of attention since the affinity between the literature and emerging designs is becoming manifest. Speculative design embodies its ethical advantage by asking ‘what-if’ questions and providing no answer to keep its prerequisite of equality of intelligence. It devises fictional props and unreal scenarios to distribute the sensible to make audiences notice the possible latent negative social consequences of future technologies. The absurdity in speculative design is what Rancière termed ‘dissensus’, which is the result of fictional aesthetics that aims to inspire reflection and debate on the current state of reality and open the possibility for preferable transformation.

Pluriverse Skins DIY Bio-Production. For a Post-Anthropocentric Coexistence

By developing practice-based research, through critical and speculative design methodologies, we propose a definition of “skin” not as a univocal boundary of subjective bodies (animal, plants, or other creatures), but as a pluriverse membrane of connection across and between species. Deeply inspired by holistic and posthuman philosophical approaches (such as Braidotti, Pannikar, Escobar, Coccia), the ongoing research feeds such a definition of “pluriverse skins” by experiments on bio-media and the relative speculative scenarios. We present three aspects of the study: a) preliminary reflection about how design is affected and transformed by ecological notions; b) design experiments in bio-media to create skins that can unfold as the carrier of new forms of ecological awareness; c) discussion about the aesthetic of bioskins and implication for the notion of a new post-anthropocentrism at large. Pluriverse Skins offers an alternative look into biomaterials, by the means of practical and speculative investigation: in the paper we discuss how such an approach could contribute to reshaping the meaning of bio production, within the emerging post-anthropocentric paradigm.

Review: Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology, by Adam Nocek

Review: <i>Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology</i>, by Adam Nocek

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement Reynaldo Anderson (bio) There is an energy abroad in the world today that is influenced by financialization, digitalization, commodification and globalization that seeks to marginalize presence, erase our memories, and quiet our voices. Yet we persist, we refuse to die, and our persistence has yielded fruit. The Black Speculative Arts Movement is a product of memories that survive in our cultural DNA that remind us of the need for safe harbors to imagine Black utopias for the beautiful unborn and honor the best of our past. More specifically, the Black Speculative tradition gave birth to what we now refer to as Afrofuturism with its roots in 19th century discourses around anti-slavery revolutionary practices, science, and early pan-Africanist sentiment. The cultural critic Greg Tate asserted that a people without visionaries is a people without an inspirational path to the future. Black speculative literatures genesis lies in the 19th century with the work of men and women like Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs and Pauline Hopkins. Their work grappled with the intersection of the oppression of African people, scientific racism, esotericism, and politics. Their work and other Black writers paralleled the emergence of the European science fiction tradition. The origins of the Black Speculative Arts Movement lie in the planning and execution of the Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination cocurated by John Jennings and I in a 2015 exhibition at the Schomburg library in Harlem, New York. The conceptual and speculative design for the exhibition were heavily influenced by the vision and scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and the ideas and material culture produced by artists and intellectuals that contribute to Black speculative culture. However, the social movement dynamism of the Black Speculative Arts Movement reflects historical processes, global in scope, that have historical currents in societal changes that have emerged the last 50 years. Although the movement is indebted to earlier Black diasporic art formations that date back to the early 20th century, it has been heavily influenced by the social changes described as Future Shock, Megatrends, and Acceleration. For example, what can be described as the Future Shock era of social change of the 60s and 70s aptly described by writer Alvin Toffler and singer Curtis Mayfield. Future Shock, or the social disorientation that accompanied rapid social change in technology and social values shaped the artistic work and production of creatives like Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and other artists and [End Page 5] thinkers of the period producing work that was in conversation with the global Black liberation struggle and Black Arts movement of the period in question. Moreover, the work of these artists would sow the seeds of creative thought and praxis later generations of creatives would refer to as Afrofuturism. However, the work of these creatives was only the beginning of forecasting the currents of social change that would be referred to by some as the era of megatrends of the late 20th century. The megatrends of the late 20th century reflected changes in capitalism that were tied to the end of the Cold War and an intensification of the spread of neoliberalism and globalization whose ideas and conceptual origins were reflected in the policies and ideas of Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, and Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, during this period of the late 80s and early 90s scholars like Cornel West, Molefi Asante, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks and others would produce intellectual works that would increasingly reflect a post-civil rights era sentiment among Black scholars. Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian characterized the environment best when she wrote an essay “The Race for Theory” in 1987 that described the environment surrounding the attempt to frame the new environment. During the period in question, Black Studies scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and C.T. Keto at Temple University, wrote about the destiny of African people in relation to time and space, and the need to be futurologists, and comic creators like Dwane McDuffie illustrated futuristic Black sensibilities. During this social milieu cultural critic Mark Dery wrote an article “Black to the Future” that observed the nexus between black speculative...

Data excellence for AI

This forum provides a space to engage with the challenges of designing for intelligent algorithmic experiences. We invite articles that tackle the tensions between research and practice when integrating AI and UX design. We welcome interdisciplinary debate, artful critique, forward-looking research, case studies of AI in practice, and speculative design explorations. --- Juho Kim and Henriette Cramer, Editors

Holistic Asset Performance Management Systems: Speculative design for Industrial APM systems and human work experience in an Industry 5.0 setting

AbstractThe aim of this article is to comprehend human work experience in industry 5.0. In the next generation of human systems integration, the major challenge will be to incorporate creative experiences of people with technologies. This aspect will be particularly salient when using Asset Performance management Systems. In this article, we use a qualitative futures planning approach with a speculative design methodology to comprehend human experience in next generation work systems. We propose that by incorporating human experience, we need to characterize these systems as Holistic Asset Performance Management systems that consider the human without reducing it to the mechanistic component. By building on the speculative enactment method, this research also explores the advantages of involving actual creative individuals in the enactment process to achieve better results. It concludes with speculations for the future of APM systems and raises certain questions related to ethics.

스마트 시티 시각 장애인의 삶의 질(QoL) 향상을 위한 이동성 개선 서비스 시나리오 제안 -추측적디자인(Speculative Design)과 Science Fiction Probe 의 융합적 활용을 중심으로

본 연구는 장애인 등의 사회 취약 계층이 기술 발전 혜택에서 소외되고 있는 현실에 대한 대안을 제시하고자 시작되었다. 본 연구의 목적은 시각 장애인 이동성 개선 서비스 개발을 통해 더욱 포용적인 기술발전상을 제안하는 것이다. 따라서 본 논문은 design thinking 방법론의 4단계 프로세스를 따라 사용자의 경험을 개선하는 서비스 개발을 이행하였다.BR 연구결과 및 내용은 다음과 같다. 첫째, Discover-define 단계에서는 시각 장애인 2명과 시각장애인 학교 근무자 1명과의 심층 인터뷰를 통해 이동성에 관련한 물리적, 감정적 불편 요소들을 파악하였다. 또한, 추측적디자인(speculative design)관점을 문학과 융합한 science fiction probe를 활용하여 서비스의 핵심을 도출하였다. 둘째, Develop-deliver 단계에서는 현 GPS 기반 음성 경로 안내 서비스의 한계를 극복하고자 블루투스 비컨을 통한 마커 기반 경로 안내 서비스를 개발하였고 흰 지팡이에 탈부착이 가능한 촉각 기반 내비게이션 제품을 개발하였다. 셋째, 위 서비스 및 제품의 경제성을 위하여 로봇 배달 서비스 산업 분야와의 협력점을 연구하였고 서비스 블루프린트 작성을 통해 시각 장애인, 로봇 배달 서비스, 도보 배달원, 그리고 정부의 상호 보완 관계를 제시하였다.BR 이러한 연구결과를 바탕으로 본 연구는 더욱 포용적인 미래도시 형성을 위한 기업과 정부의 역할을 제시하였으며 이를 토대로 첨단 기술 산업과 서비스디자인을 융합한 향후 사회적인 디자인 연구를 기대한다.

Reconsidering Lost Opportunities for Diverse Representation

AbstractThis article considers the cultural politics of frustrated potential for diverse representation in games by examining developer comments on the 1995 digital game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction story of the same name. While Ellison’s story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a “lost opportunity” for exploring gay identity. Rooted in discussion of this frustrated potential for a gay in-game Benny, this article interrogates a logic of lost opportunity for diverse representation present in game-development discourse, which manifests in a longing for more diverse characters that could have been but never came to be. This logic suggests particular ways that developers might conceive of diverse representation as simply a design issue under neoliberal logics of economic opportunity, commercial risk, and fetishized innovation—without meaningful consideration of political significance. Opposing this instrumentalization of frustrated diverse representation, this article draws on queer game studies and speculative design and literature to explore the possible contours and implications of diverse characters that never were more seriously than such comments typically do. Doing so demands more than romanticized longings for lost opportunities for diverse representation that treat this longing as the end in itself.

Speculative Design as a Collaborative Practice: Ameliorating the Consequences of Illiteracy through Digital Touch

This article and the design fictions it presents are bound up with an ongoing qualitative-ethnographic study with Imazighen, the native people in remote Morocco. This group of people is marked by textual and digital illiteracy. We are in the process of developing multi-modal design fictions that can be used in workshops as a starting point for the co-development of further design fictions that envision the local population's desired digital futures. The design fictions take the form of storyboards, allowing for a non-textual engagement. The current content seeks to explore challenges, potentials, margins, and limitations for the future design of haptic and touch-sensitive technology as a means for interpersonal communication and information procurement. Design fictions provide a way of exposing the locals to possible digital futures so that they can actively engage with them and explore the bounds and confines of their literacy and the extent to which it matters.

Do solar households want demand response and shared electricity data? Exploring motivation, ability and opportunity in Australia

The success of Australia's energy transition is dependent on households’ motivation, ability and opportunity to participate in it. This involves technologically-mediated participation in demand response, such as sharing control of solar or battery assets or sharing electricity data use/generation data with third parties. Applying the Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA) framework, this paper uses in-depth interviews and speculative design with 39 Australian solar panel owners (“prosumers”) to understand the values and concerns driving their motivation and ability to participate. Fairness, autonomy, control, trust, privacy and collectivism affect participants’ motivation to curtail energy use, share control of solar/battery assets and share energy data, yet motivation does not guarantee ability to participate. The paper contributes and operationalises a provisional method for scoring Motivation, Ability in the MOA framework, toward better understanding customers’ potential use or participation in future energy technologies and interactions. This quantification overcomes limitations of existing scoring systems which do not adequately account for negative (rather than simply low) motivation. Findings suggest that increasing users’ ability with emergent technologies requires first increasing familiarity and further avenues for more involved consumer participation in the design of energy futures.

“I now deeply care about the effects humans are having on the world”: cultivating ecological care and responsibility through complex systems modelling and investigations

ABSTRACT Objective Systems thinking can be counterintuitive to everyday ways of knowing. This can surface doubt around predicted patterns of emergence in complex systems data, especially as it relates to the current climate crisis and related justice-oriented solutions. Method Our study describes a four-year design-based research project in which we engaged high school biology students in complex systems modelling to understand linkages between increasing ocean temperatures and the rate and severity of disease outbreaks in sea stars. Results Our findings showed that students approached climate data with uncertainty and viewed their lives as separate from the impacts of climate change. Through iterative design work, youth used authentic data and computational tools to construct geospatial and causal-loop models of climate-related disease outbreaks that situated case studies within broader socioecological and sociotechnical contexts of historic and powered human actions. Through a speculative design lens, models were transformed from data visualization tools to mediums for storying and re-storying present and future worlds for multispecies survival in the face of the climate crisis. Conclusion Students shifted their understandings of disease outbreaks from a technical perspective to a more social and situated lens of care and responsibility for mitigating the impacts of the climate crisis on human and more-than-human communities. KEY POINTS What is already known about this topic: (1) Teachers that cover climate change often focus solely on technical and data-based aspects during instruction, such as the carbon cycle and increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, without including the social and political contexts through which the climate emergency emerged. (2) Engaging students in meaningful action and problem-solving creates positive affective outcomes and retains hope in students in the face of future climate impacts. (3) There is still more that we need to learn about how to design learning environments that cultivate hope, agency, and multispecies caring in K-12 contexts. What this topic adds: (1) We show how complex systems modelling and data visualization can cultivate multispecies caring and climate action by situating climate-related phenomena in larger socioecological and sociotechnical systems. (2) Through a speculative design lens, we show how modelling can be transformed from data visualization to storytelling and re-storying present and future worlds that centre on ecological and multispecies flourishing. Here we show a new ontological dimension of modelling practices as future and world making. (3) Our research shows how multispecies caring emerged as an action in this world, and for creating the future worlds students wanted to see; it became an affective dimension for making meaning amid the complexity and uncertainty of the climate crisis.

What if The World without Bees?

What if the world without bees? Biologist thinks 50% of the species will be facing extinction by the end of the century.[1]As the topic of sustainable development draws more attention, ecological sustainability has become a hot topic. Protecting endangered animals seems to be an urgent issue. This essay is going to analyze how speculative design could be used within my specialism - collaborative creativity in order to protect endangered animals. There are several case studies that reflect on the speculative design’s effect on protecting endangered animals.

The State of Glitch.

The State of Glitch project is a provocation and invitation to discuss the governance of AI and Data. To ensure digital disruptions are positive there is an urgent need to better understand the impact of AI, on individuals, communities and the environment and to improve the lack of diversity and inclusivity in policymaking. Because of the complex nature of the challenges, this contribution argues for transdisciplinary research adopting a wide variety of methods including arts based, speculative design and future studies approaches. Acknowledging the importance of imagination to create the futures we want, this contribution invites the reader to consider a plausible future society where people and AI systems will co-exist, live work and play together and have equal rights, freedoms and responsibilities. After a brief provocation to help the reader imagine plausible futures, examples are presented to argue for the proposed role of arts and futures literacy to contribute to improving governance and regulation.

Preemptive Futures: Entropic and Negentropic Information in Speculative Design

Preemption is an anticipatory action taken to secure first-options in maximising future gain and/or minimising loss. For instance, in risk management, responses are planned before a crisis takes place; such preemptive decisions are made based on speculations of possible future(s), directed by information feedback and analysis from a variety of sources. A systematic formulation of preemption and its relationship to computation are deeply rooted in the history of WWII; in the big data era, preemption is further augmented by the collaboration of human and machine intelligences, urging a rethink on how information is produced and used. By tracing a timeline of events around the conceptualisation of informa- tion, this paper aims at understanding the design and planning implications of preemptive decisions and how it may help us in rethinking speculative design. This paper first revises the idea of ‘information’ through a historical and theoret- ical study, and how it had been defined differently through the notion of entropy by Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Erwin Schrodinger from fields of cy- bernetics, information, and quantum theories. It discusses entropy from three perspectives: information compression and reconstruction, information entropy and energy entropy, interpolation and extrapolation. Finally, based on entropic and negentropic use of information, this paper rethinks the roles of specula- tion and preemption in today’s design context, especially their applications in the collaborative intelligence of humans and machines within distributed, open source networks.