After the first Global Design Future(GDF) course, although our tutor emphasized many times that speculative design is not to find a solution but open up a conversation, I still feel confused about the goal and purpose of it, and I cannot figure out what kind of design belong to speculative design and what kind of design don’t.
Without figure out that, our team begin to think about ideas, which turned out to be a wrong decision. In our first group meeting, we found each of us has different understanding of speculative design, which resulted in the starting point of each idea is very different. This is the first time we did lots of useless work because we didn’t do any research.(But that time we didn’t realize that.)
After I did some research and communicated with my classmates, our team were finally in the same page! When I watched the lecture of Phil Balagtas, president and founder of Design Future Initiative, on Youtube, I found something inspired me a lot.
And what the purpose to think about speculative design:
Based on this lecture and communicates with my team member, this is my understanding of speculative design:
There are some phenomenon existing in the world nowadays, if we amplify them into future, what could happen? If you have a future like that, what do you think of today?
Reference:
Balagtas, P. (2019). Design Is [Speculative] Futures Design Thinking — a new toolkit for preemptive design. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB9UVHGI6AI [Accessed 26 Feb, 2020]