Speculative Sprint: Experimental Workshop in South Korea by Students from the Royal College of Art, London
We are extremely proud to have been a catalyst for bringing together 21 students from varying design backgrounds and different institutions: Samsung Art & Design Institute (sadi), Technology University of Korea (TU Korea) and Seoul Women’s Univeristy (SWU); to collaborate together for the first time. The students who participated in the workshop came up with diverse speculative worlds and rendered products within 2 days. We had many thought provoking discussions about the implications and purpose throughout the process as well. Overall, the outcome was very successful. The students really enjoyed the new design and thinking process (which was very different from what they are used to) and expressed that they would like to have more collaborations with each other in the future.
Hello! We are JJ, Xin, and Savio. We are MA./MSc. Global Innovation Design (GID) students at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. In June 2022, with the help of Professor Jongho Lee from Samsung Art & Design Institute (sadi), we had the opportunity to facilitate a 2-day experimental speculative sprint workshop for design students from three different universities in South Korea.
Speculative Design was the first project in our MA programme in London and in the spirit of “global” in GID, we were curious to explore it further in different cultural contexts. Due to our limited time with the Korean students, we tried to condense a process that usually takes weeks and months into just days through a guided sprint. This may be the quickest speculative design project (as far as we know!)
We wanted to document our process and takeaways so that this can serve as a reference for anyone who would like to do speculative design in a hackathon style, especially in a different cultural context. Read about our journey below!
Content:
- What is “Speculative Design”?
- Who Are We & How Did We Get Here?
- Considerations & Workshop Planning
- Workshop Day 1
- Workshop Day 2
- Overall Takeaways
- In Summary: Speedy speculative design is hard, but worthwhile!
- Special Thanks
- Contact Us
1. What is “Speculative Design”?
In one breath — speculative design is an approach of imagining alternative futures outside the constraints of our current-day consumer-driver, mass manufacturing, capitalist society and designing for people who don’t — or don’t yet — exist for a more desirable future. This practice orients us towards ideas outside the status quo that might reveal roadmaps for our future or insights about our present. It’s crazy, fun, and liberating. And it’s a great way of getting to know our world today.
In a few more breathes — An endless supply of post-it notes with both eyes glued to the present can keep us treading on the hamster wheel when we should be escaping the cage. To a lot of emerging designers like ourselves, the design practice can feel like an endless process of discovering problems and meandering towards small solutions within larger problematic systems. We are tied down by what’s possible, practical, and profitable most of the time after all. Our world is a complicated sludge of systems built on systems, and speculative design gives permission to take a step back for a minute and dream.
Kubrick imagined the iPad in 1968, Comics and cartoons that feature smart watches go way back to the 1930s. While we’d be hard pressed to find any empirically tested causality between science fiction and today’s technology, speculative media at least gives us a lens through which we might evaluate the types of futures we desire and detest. Speculative Design, popularised by designers and educators Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, argues that designers can have that same effect on the world.
2. Who Are We & How Did We Get Here?
MA./MSc. Global Innovation Design (GID) is a double masters programme taught by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, in London UK. This is currently the only course of its kind, taking in less than 30 students every year from various countries and backgrounds. John Agcaoili (JJ) has a background in Information Design who does all sorts and anything to do with digital media; Xin Wen is an interdisciplinary designer who focuses primarily in environmental, spatial, and system design;
Savio M. Mukhachirayil has a background in Industrial Design with an interest in rituals and cultural practices and innovating for societal good. Other peers in our programme come from various backgrounds ranging from Design to Business to Social Studies. Creating design leaders and innovators with the ability to bring social change is at the heart of our programme.
In GID, we have the opportunity to do study exchanges with partnering institutions. Half of the cohort (including the three of us) were supposed to study at Tsinghua University in Beijing, between March and June 2022. Due to COVID measures in China, we were not able to travel into the country and instead had to take classes remotely. However, having the desire to experience international learning as much as we could in person; with the help of our RCA Head of the Programme, Professor Gareth Loudon, Savio took the initiative to reach out to multiple educational institutes for informal visits, either to attend classes or partake in workshops or to formulate one.
One of the contacts was Professor JongHo Lee, a senior tutor at sadi and he expressed interest in doing a project or a workshop with us. In May, we discussed amongst ourselves and came up with a potential week-long speculative design exercise on the future of communication (since we thought we would be working primarily with his students in sadi). During one of our conversations with Prof. Lee, we discovered that speculative design is still very new to Korea, and students may not fully understand the term or way of thinking, this led to exploring this area.
We put together a brief presentation to show our workshop concept to the faculty members and students from the three universities, then for more informal and efficient communication, instead of emails we moved to KakaoTalk and created a group for all interested students. We were originally thinking about collaborating with the students directly, speculating and designing together with them. However, this quickly changed because of timing and logistical constraints, due to uncertainty surrounding schedules and ability to commit, we had a lot of fluctuations in group size and expectations. At the end, only the three of us were able to make it as there were unfortunate issues with visas and COVID tests. Since so few of us were able to go, we decided to become facilitators of the workshop instead. This would also eliminate potential language barriers that would make working together less efficient over the already short amount of time.
3. Considerations & Workshop Planning
Format consideration.
Initially, we wanted to do a project with the students in Korea together. We envisioned that each group will have a few Korean students plus one GID student. However, as we thought through the process, we realised we would need at least one facilitator on our end — someone who wasn’t participating in any groups so they could manage the entire flow of the workshop. However, this would mean that we might have to limit the number of students who could sign up, since there aren’t many of us going to Korea to begin with.
Language Consideration.
Another concern that came up during this time was that the students in Korea wanted to know the required English level for this workshop. We realised that in a workshop that spans only 2.5 days, communicating in a different language would be very difficult. Especially important for the topic of Speculative Design, where most of it is talking about your ideas and communicating with each other about a future world. This factor also would limit the amount of students who could join us, since working directly with us would require them to be able to communicate their ideas comfortably in English (unfortunately none of us spoke Korean).
Workshop Plan.
Given these considerations, we decided that it would be best if we served as facilitators instead, and to have teams of only Korean students. This worked well, looking back it would’ve been impossible for us to manage the workshop and participate in it at the same time. Due to the time constraints of only having two official workshop days and half a day for the briefing, we decided on this structure but as there was areas of uncertainty, we left room in our plan for spontaneous changes along the way.
Workshop topic.
Initially, we proposed a speculative design brief on the future of communication in Korea, after further coversation from the Korean side, we decided to tweak the workshop toward the direction of “what is the future of Korea and its creative learning environment”.
Logistics: Briefing.
The logistics of the order which we would visit the schools was handled by Prof.Lee and the faculty at the different instituitions, we had a miro board which allowed everyone in Korea and the three of us who were in different countries at the time to see, which helped us to plan. On the first day, we introduced the concept of Speculative Design (its history, purpose, etc), as well as the brief for the workshop at the campus of TU Korea. We outlined the rough schedule, work format, time commitment expectation and more, so that students who were interested could choose to sign up for the official workshop (Thurs-Fri). This session had a live translator, and was live on Zoom as well for those who couldn’t join us in TU Korea. Following the session, we sent out a sign-up survey and individual activities for students to get started with their thinking.
Logistics: Group Sorting.
In our online survey, we asked for students’ school and design background so that we could create diverse groups from across the 3 different institutions. We asked on the survey to score their comfortability level with communicating their ideas in English. Most students studied Product Design or UX, and there were varying levels of English abilities, from not comfortable at all to very comfortable. At the end, we were able to sort the 21 students who signed up into 7 teams of 3. Each team had students of at least two schools and two types of backgrounds, and at least one student who was comfortable with speaking English (so that we could communicate smoothly with each team).
Workshop Structure.
It was important to us that they are able to take the time to focus on worldbuilding and the thinking process, so we made sure to not give them the details of each of the shared steps before we actually got to it, so that they wouldn’t be thinking about the final product ahead of time.
Day 0: Individual activities.
Before the start of the workshop, we assigned the students with individual thinking exercises to help get their minds used to thinking about the future. It is hard to directly imagine a future world, we asked them to come up with a list of uncertainties about the future of Korea in 2040, and also provided an optional exercise, Generation Chains. This was one exercise that we did as a part of our module in the GID programme that was helpful for us to think about how different generations have different events, fears, and hopes, leading to very different societies and cultures, as well as the things that we used.
4. Workshop Day 1
Icebreaker Exercise
We kicked off in a local cafe (Cafe Basicment). Professor Lee organised it for us, thinking that it would be a good way for the groups to meet each other in a more informal setting. We did self introductions and played a fun non-competitive icebreaker called “Human Machine”. In this activity, each person has to be a part of a greater “machine”, by contributing their own sound and motion. We went down the circle just making silly sounds and movements, and it was a really good way to get everyone more relaxed and open with one another.
Macro World Building.
We moved to sadi library to start the workshop officially after a brief lunch break. We asked the students to discuss with each other their lists of uncertainties and create an uncertainties spectrum as a way to start talking about their collective vision for the future world. The teams were then asked to imagine a world based on the uncertainty spectrum, come up with a name, a paragraph description, and a visual moodboard of their world.
While checking in with each of the groups, we realised that many groups were talking about the world on a very surface level that was focused on technology, they thought they had everything figured out and weren’t digging deeper, to identify the nuaces of the human behaviours and interactions of this world they created, the more detail you add the more real it would feel which would help later on. The macro world building took about 2.5 hours.
Micro world building + Sketch Session
Once they have established the world, we asked the teams to start thinking about the future learning environment of Korea, as well as to start thinking about a specific person in this future world to focus on. We gave them prompts and tips to encourage them to think outside of the box, both directly on the slides and also in our conversations with the individual teams as we walked around.
As the last activity of day 1, we asked them to start thinking about things they could make for the persona that they came up with in this future learning environment. We could tell that students were much more in their comfort zones as people made really elaborate sketches really quickly.
5. Workshop Day 2
Speculative designing
On day 2, we worked on the campus of Seoul Women’s University from 11am — 4:30pm with a lunch break in the middle. The teams chose one of their sketches to develop further and visualise, and prepared for their final presentation. For this part, we were mostly hands-off and left the teams to do their own things.
Presentation + Debrief
As a result of some students being only able to be there for part of the workshop on the first day, we ended up having 6 groups rather than the original 7 groups. But all the teams worked well together to put out incredible final presentations. During the presentation, we opened an ahaslides link so that students can provide live feedback and reaction to other group’s presentations at their own pace. We thought that this would make it easier for us to debrief after (no pressure on anyone to give feedback in the moment). Professor Lee also invited an RCA alumni, Jisoo Lim, to join us for feedback. The presentation was live on zoom and recorded.
We had a debrief session at the end, where we talked about some feedback for each individual team. We also reflected together on the overall experience of the workshop, and talked about the final takeaways.
6. Overall Takeaways
We learned so much in this whole process, from workshop management and planning, to seeing speculative design in a whole other timeframe and cultural context.
Workshop Management
- Anticipate, but adapt. Everything took a lot longer than we thought it would. But sometimes it’s okay to not plan details too thoroughly, but be prepared for possibilities and to adapt spontaneously.
- Additional help would be nice. During the workshop, we had a good balance of roles. JJ primarily took on the role of presenting slides and giving instructions, Savio primarily checked in with the teams to give advice, while Xin handled a lot of the backend logistics and organisation. Would have appreciated one more person to be in charge of documenting the process though!
- Mindful icebreakers. In different cultures, people may be conservative about sharing their thoughts to different degrees. In the process of speculative design as a group, it may be helpful to plan collaborative icebreakers that are not goal or winning oriented. Activities like “Human Machine” that help people to move their bodies may also help in the process.
Cultural and People Factors
- Language Considerations. Things might get lost in translation! It is important to realise that direct translations might not carry the same nuance in a different culture and language. We definitely could have done a better job communicating with a native translator ahead of time, had we known our seminar was going to be translated on the spot. Also, we need to be mindful of the time it takes for a non-native to communicate their ideas clearly (and always factor extra time).
- Future Orientation. In our conversations with Professor Lee, he expressed that Korean students have not been exposed to future speculative thinking in their design education. Having that as context was good because we were able to create an especially guided process to help them navigate this new way of thinking. It is important to consider how future oriented people are, and how open they are to new ways of thinking. This can be influenced by cultural factors, design education style, etc.
Unexpected Outcomes
- Non-contextualized personas. A few teams initially envisioned personas in the future of Korea as middle aged white men. When we asked them why they had such a persona, they were not really able to articulate why, but reconsidered it afterwards.
- Lots of clarification needed. Throughout the world building process, people were asking us a lot of questions like “what should we think about?”, “What society values should we think about”? We didn’t want to be too rigid about what they should think about, but also unsure whether “you should decide” is the best answer.
- Tech-oriented worlds. The outcome of worldbuilding from all the teams was very much focused on technology, and not very human-oriented (culture, behaviours, mindsets, connections, etc.). Perhaps because many of the students were from a product design background, they easily defaulted to creating physical products really quickly. We had to keep reminding them with questions like “how will people feel in this kind of world”? It was also easy for the envisioned product to suddenly get detached from the world.
- Hard to think wild. We found that students tended to think about now vs the future, rather than what are the possibilities of the future. Many future worlds were initially a lot like the present world but with more tech until we encouraged them to think more wildly.
If We Were to Do It Again…
- Prompt Design. The year we gave them (2040 AD)might have been limiting them a bit too much to reality. People may interpret it differently.
- Structure and guiding. We spent a lot of time answering their questions about what they should be doing during the world building process. Maybe more structure is needed for people exploring this for the first time, especially in a culture that doesn’t tend to deal with future explorative thinking. In a short sprint like this, there’s not enough time for in-depth mental grappling with the process.
- Instructions…or not? Giving students a list of instructions on the slides led to an overall tendency of jumping to the end goal rather than focusing on the process. We should put more consideration into the balance between giving people a heads up of what is coming, and avoiding them rushing through to the end.
- Context and Examples. We may need to give more context ahead of time on what is world building in a way that is relatable to their culture, as there was confusion even after the workshop officially started. We should consider giving more examples, but they cannot be complicated as they are trying to understand us through a non native language. Also be aware that giving examples might prime their thinking and direction.
- Check-in frequency. Important to consider how frequently we should check in with the groups. It’s a balance between letting groups struggle with the process (in a productive way) and helping them (but to some extent, inevitably influencing how they decide to proceed).
- Speculative Styles. We should mention at the beginning of the workshop that people may have different speculative tendencies and that is okay. Some people might be more feasibility oriented, and others might be happy to speculate more wildly. It would be helpful for group dynamics and buffer frustrations if we bring up early on that it is okay for team members to bring different speculative styles.
- Atmosphere. During the process, we should take the overall room atmosphere into consideration. It is important to be aware of broader group sentiments, and reassure students in a timely manner that it is okay to feel confused and frustrated at points.
- Reduce “tech” primers. During our workshop, we frequently mentioned words like “sci-fi” or “futuristic”. These words are frequently associated with technology, and less so with human values and society. Perhaps we can consider more careful word choices to avoid priming participants to think about technology more than people.
Other Possibilities
- Madlib style? Students seemed to struggle with conceptualising a whole new world. Perhaps a Madlib style guide could be a good framework for people to come up with new worlds quickly.
- More time between workshop days? If time allows, it might be productive to give people time to simmer on ideas in between workshop days.
- Hopes and fears first? Perhaps we could start with an emphasis on thinking about hopes and fears for future uncertainties, rather than how the world will be objectively. This would put an emphasis on emotions and behaviours rather than technology.
- Creation of narratives? A larger emphasis on creative narratives might help people to not think of things in terms of tech and products only, but how people of the future will interact and react.
- Different populations?It would be interesting to see what kind of outcomes we would get if we tried this workshop with a more diverse group, including people of different ages and backgrounds.
7. In Summary: Speedy speculative design is hard, but worthwhile!
The speculative design process is hard and definitely confusing for students exposed to it for the first time. The obvious downside to doing it in such a short period of time is that there is not enough time to struggle, discuss, and process. These are some of the most valuable parts of the process because it truly makes one think and question our perception and assumptions of our understanding of the current and future world. In a short amount of time, it is difficult for a speculative world to have much depth. However, speculative sprints are definitely valuable endeavours that can quickly introduce new ways of thinking and prompt critical reflection. There is no right way to create worlds and no perfect workshop outcomes, but the process can help plant seeds for alternative perspectives, greater understanding of our own perception of the world, and freedom to think outside the box.
8. Special Thanks
This workshop would not have been possible without the help of all the participating organizations, the students and faculty, especially the help of the people below:
- Professor Gareth Loudon, The Royal College of Art.
- Professor Jongho Lee, Samsung Art and Design Institute.
- Professor Eok Kim, Technology University Korea.
- Professor Jihyun Lee, Seoul Women’s University.
- Dawoon Yim, sadi student.
For a summary of the workshop in Korean, check out Yim’s blogpost on his website.
9. Contact Us!
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, comments, or insights! We would love to hear from you and discuss all things speculative together :)
savio@network.rca.ac.uk
xin.wen@network.rca.ac.uk
jgca@network.rca.ac.uk