Speculative design combines hypothetical extrapolations of the development of emerging technologies with a consideration of the cultural landscape into which they may be deployed. The often familiar and engaging nature of the designed outputs is intended to facilitate discourse with a broad audience on these speculative future products, systems and services in order to reflect upon their impact a specific technology may have on our everyday lives.
Whilst design is often seen as being applied to an unambiguous objective, a speculative approach frees design from such constraints and thus can often appear subversive and irreverent in nature. In Imagination our approach to speculative design often embraces this irreverence by presenting technologies through games and playful experiences.
The effect of creating a ‘magic circle’ encourages greater exploration and the interactive nature of games allows us to adopt a procedural rhetoric design approach through which players can rehearse possible futures. This approach is also applied to our work in Design Fictions that create diegetic prototypes through which near future technologies can be presented as plausible futures.
