Speculative Design and Science Fiction: The blurry boundaries between fact, fiction, and tech design.

Speculative design is an alternative design process that has gained momentum in the last decade as a tool for approaching difficult and abstract problems pertaining to humankind’s future and its relationship to technology and sustainability (Bleecker, 2009; Candy, 2010; Dunne and Raby, 2013). While design fields such as product design and industrial design tend to address immediate problems with literal, design-based solutions, speculative design looks further into the future and produces design propositions that are not beholden to literal questions of marketability or scalability, allowing for the production of imaginative, provocative and critical ideas.

This one-hour lecture will give a brief overview of contemporary speculative design, as well as the many instances of overlaps between speculative design, science fiction, and consumer tech development.