A short introduction to Speculative Design

“Speculative design aims to address big societal problems that we are currently creating for ourselves by exploring a spectrum of possible futures.”

The idea is to start with the future and work back to today. By exploring a spectrum of possible futures, including those that might seem irrelevant, weird or unlikely, we can learn a lot about where we might want to act today.

This diversity of thinking enables us to prepare for the challenges of the future. In fact, it is probably the best way to become truly flexible and resilient to change.

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. (I don’t recommend reading it. To abstract & academic for my taste)

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.”

It seeks to answer questions like:

• How might current trends evolve in the future?
• How might we prepare for the future?
• What might unintended side effects of [XY] be?

It’s important to note that we’re not talking about predicting the future, those who try often end up dead wrong anyway.

Instead, speculative design aims to imagine futures that could be. What is probable, plausible, probable, or preferable? These explorations are then used to better understand what we want and don’t want to see in our future as a society.

On a side note: Fantasy does not belong to the method of speculative design.

Why you should speculate about the future

Besides trying to be prepared for technological progress and the associated changes in our habits and behaviour, a strong benefit of speculative design is being able to anticipate and prepare for black swan events.

The black swan theory describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized afterwards with the benefit of hindsight.

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain the disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology. In other words it’s about anticipating the unexpected.

For example it was known that a worldwide Pandemic would hit us at some point, most of us just weren’t prepared, because they never looked into such a probable future scenario.

Others however had explored similar scenarios through speculative design and were better equiped to deal with situation. As just one example: Designit, the company I work for, had helped a client in the energy sector speculate about futue catastrophic events a while ago. One of the scenarios the client ended up wanting to investigate was a poisonous cloud that kept everyone locked up at home for weeks. Based on that scenario they developed fall back options for how to run their power plant without people needing to be there physically. Needless to say that this preparation has paid off during Corona.

A growing number of organizations like Visa, Pepsi, Ford, and even NATO have also understood this for a while and have hired science fiction writers to help them create more innovative products and strategies or anticipate future events. They all recognize the importance of speculation when it comes to staying ahead of the game.

I suggest you try it out as well.

Don’t know how? I’ll be covering more on this topic in future ;)

Here is an example of a simple written scenario based approach.

You might also enjoy reading about hybrid futures.

I’d also love to know what you thought about this piece?