Speculative design: Powering product direction with imagination

What is speculative design?

Speculative design can be described as a creative and forward-thinking design approach that explores alternative futures and challenges assumptions. It aims to provoke critical thinking by envisioning innovative scenarios and concepts that may or may not come to fruition. The term, initially introduced by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, is gaining popularity in the world of design, science, and art.

It derives from a line of different directions — critical design, design fiction, world-building, radical design, interrogative design, etc. All these disciplines can be united in an attempt to take a look beyond the current state of things and focus on modeling preferable realities. And speculative design is interested specifically in future consequences and implications of the relationship between science, technology, and humans.

Speculative design perspective can be used by companies and designers from other fields as a critical thinking tool to examine problems from a different viewpoint and switch from tactical thinking to a strategic mindset.

• What are the principles of speculative design?
• 4 ways to define the future
• Imagining alternative futures
  • Define a context for debate
  • Ideate, find problems, and create a scenario
  • Materialize the scenario to provoke an audience
• What can a UX designer learn from speculative design concepts?
  • Creativity and critical thinking
  • Ethical considerations and global mission
  • Strategic thinking
  • Narrative approaches
  • Collaborative and interdisciplinary approach

What are the principles of speculative design?

Instead of reacting to current challenges and solving immediate problems, speculative design explores the possibilities of the future and attempts to identify new potential problems. It exists apart from industrial production and marketplaces and doesn’t intend to provide comprehensive solutions. Being a conceptual direction of design, speculative design is about ideas and searching for ideals, reflecting on how things might be.

We can define three main goals that speculative design pursues like this:

1. Exploring possible futures: Speculative design allows us to imagine and visualize potential future scenarios, technologies, and social changes and prepare for what lies ahead
2. Challenging assumptions and pushing boundaries: It challenges established norms and assumptions, fostering innovation and pushing boundaries in design thinking
3. Prompting critical thinking and initiating discussion: By presenting alternative realities and considering the implications of different choices, speculative design stimulates discussions about ethics, societal impact, and human behavior

The mission of speculative design is to enact change for a preferable future rather than conforming to the status quo.

4 ways to define the future

How do we define a preferable future? Futurologist Stuart Candy has created a diagram of different levels of future likelihood:

Stuart Candy’s cone diagram illustrates various levels of future likelihood, depicting Probable, Plausible, and Possible futures that include and expand each other, and a Preferable future that lies on the intersection of the Probable and Plausible sections.

• Probable future includes what is more likely to happen. The future is seen as a logical continuation of the present. This is the space where most designers operate — without potential financial crisis, ecological disaster, or a global pandemic around the corner.
• Plausible futures take hypothetical events into account. Real-life examples of working in these conditions can be medical institutions or any other public service bodies creating specific protocols for various extreme conditions. The main focus here is switched from planning to preparing for challenges.
• Possible futures also include not-so-obvious scenarios. The paths into these kinds of realities might look blurry. The two conditions for calling it possible are: the scenario should be scientifically possible and there should be ways (even entirely fictional) to link the present with this hypothetical future. The most common media types that operate in the possible future are books and films — science fiction, social fiction, etc. Robots, cyberspace and the Big Brother once envisioned by writers are part of today’s reality. Beyond it lies the zone of fantasy, which exists in its own reality lacking links to ours.
• Preferable futures intersect the Probable and Plausible zones. That is where speculative design operates — by understanding challenges, it explores the future and looks for a path into the most positive scenarios. As designers are often not in control of defining the criteria of those scenarios, speculative design invites into the discussion the preferable state of things and encourages society to influence the future with their choices.

Imagining alternative futures

Speculative design is more an attitude or a position that a designer takes on than a methodology. Instead of aiming for solutions that should be practical and efficient in the commercial world, speculative design strives to be imaginative and critical to find a new perspective. The concepts are often built in an idealistic or exaggerated and satirical way to convey the idea and spur debates.

Johannessen et al. divide the process into three stages:

1. Define a context for debate
2. Ideate, find problems, and create a scenario
3. Materialize the scenario to provoke an audience

Define a context for debate

Finding the topic is a crucial step. There are two ways to define a field to address:

• Examine the technological, social, or environmental research that is not yet well-developed; accelerate it into the future to investigate the possible effect it may have.
  Example: Quantum computers have advanced to the point where they can instantly solve complex global problems. How would it affect security, healthcare, or science?
• We can also take a look at contemporary findings and use an extrapolation of current trends to build possible trajectories.
  Example: The current trend of sustainable living and eco-consciousness can lead to the creation of entirely self-sufficient communities, producing their energy, food, and resources locally. How would this impact global trade, urban design, and consumer behavior?

You can also diversify your perspective and collaborate with experts from various fields, such as science, sociology, economics, and psychology. Their insights can enrich the process by providing different lenses through which to view alternative futures.

Ideate, find problems, and create a scenario

Here, we consider how the topic we’ve chosen develops in the future. You can use the whole design toolkit and adapt whichever method is suitable — brainstorming and ideation sessions, personas and user journeys, story mapping and in-depth interviews, etc. Other ways to explore the topic include:

• Reductio ad absurdum — reduction to the absurd, taking the scenarios to the extreme, even absurd, extent to provide critical insights. Michael Westerfield’s book The Extinct and Endangered Animal Cookbook is designed to highlight the absurdity of human impact on biodiversity, using historic accounts and recipes.
• Counterfactuals — considering “what if” scenarios that deviate from established norms to explore the alternatives and their impact on the future. “Winning Formula” is project by the Near Future Laboratory that imagines the sport news as if it were done exclusively by a machine, and on March 28, 2014, 130,000 copies of a sport section generated based on big data, analytics, simulation, and AI were inserted into the Manchester Evening News.
• Ambiguity — intentionally leaving some parts of the scenario open for discussion to encourage creative thinking and engage the audience. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles intentionally blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Its exhibits include ambiguous artifacts and narratives that challenge visitors to discern between reality and imagination, provoking an array of interpretations.
• Satire — use humor, irony, or ridicule to criticize and expose flaws, vices, or absurdities; it helps to draw attention to the issues and provokes critical thinking. In response to the destruction of the iconic brutalist building of Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago, Design with Company responded with “The Monument to Bruce” project: an architectural tabernacle that contains the wrecking ball used to take down the brutalist structure.

Materialize the scenario to provoke an audience

The last step is to materialize the scenario into narratives, objects, or a combination of both. The object can be as simple as possible as long as it has a sufficient level of detail and functionality to convey the idea.

The goal is to emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually involve the audience. Unlike traditional design, which aims for clarity, speculative critical design raises questions without imposing answers.

What can a UX designer learn from speculative design concepts?

Even though a designer may not have the final word when deciding on global priorities, they can make a strong contribution. Speculative design can provoke change by building narratives and exploring the potential or consequences of ideas or technologies.

So, what can product designers learn from speculative design?

Creativity and critical thinking

Speculative design encourages us to push the boundaries of creativity by moving away from conventional assumptions and safe thinking. This shift of perspective and constant wondering of “what if” can refresh the design process. However, don’t forget to consider your users.

For example: in very simple words, Airbnb provides you with options on where to stay. In 2019, they took it to the next level by providing the opportunity to spend a night in various iconic places and transforming them into homes — the Louvre, Maracanã Stadium, Abbey Road Studios, and many others. Airbnb imagined a service where tourists can not only visit their destinations but live in them for a time.

Ethical considerations and global mission

Speculative design places a strong emphasis on ethical considerations and global impact. It prompts thinking beyond the immediate functionality or aesthetics of a product and instead considering its broader societal, environmental, and ethical implications.

An example here is that Google Maps defaults to promoting eco-friendly routes by suggesting and highlighting the lower carbon footprint option. It encourages users to make environmentally responsible choices, contributing to global sustainability efforts:

Strategic thinking

Speculative design encourages product designers to transition from a purely tactical approach to a more strategic one. Anticipation of future trends, challenges, and opportunities instead of solely focusing on solving immediate design challenges can help to design products that are not only relevant today but also adaptable and resilient in the face of future changes.

Spotify reimagined its design system — it introduced Encore, a new approach to design systems. The main goal of it is to be prepared for all the existing interfaces and those which are only yet to come.

Narrative approaches

You can see how speculative design goes beyond the functional aspects of a product and considers the emotional and experiential aspects, enhancing user engagement and understanding. The use of storytelling, scenarios, and narratives to create a wider context is a powerful tool for communicating ideas and creating immersive experiences for users.

Loóna uses speculative design through storytelling. Loóna helps you to get into the right mood to sleep. It creates an immersive artistic world with a brilliant narrative.

Collaborative and interdisciplinary approach

Take a look at other disciplines around to harness the collective intelligence of experts from various domains; it might be a fruitful collaboration. Specialists from different areas often have their own approaches or can share some insights that are hard to get otherwise.

Khan Academy is an educational platform that relies on a collaborative approach involving educators, UX designers, content creators, and engineers to create engaging, effective, and user-friendly educational experiences.

Conclusion

Speculative design is not exactly a design we are used to — it doesn’t focus on actual problem solving. Instead, it aims to contribute to social transformation in an attempt to find a preferable development of society. It contributes alternative ways of thinking and that is something we can learn from it — an additional perspective that can be useful for designers or companies to plan for the future, ideate, and communicate their ideas.

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