Speculative futuring meets AI — Experiences from an AI-enabled co-futuring workshop
Speculative design is a relatively new field that has emerged in the past few decades (Auger 2013; Dunne and Raby 2013). It is a form of design that creates hypothetical scenarios, often grounded in real-world issues, to explore the potential impacts of emerging technologies and societal trends. Speculative design is used to spark and provoke conversations about the future and challenge our assumptions about what is possible. Approaches often involve researching current trends, brainstorming scenarios of alternative futures, creating visual or tangible representations and sharing the work to contribute to a public conversation about the present and future.
As part of the Speculative Futures Helsinki Chapter, a Helsinki-based community of futures enthusiasts and part of global Futures Initiative, we were wondering how can burgeoning AI tools including text and image generators enhance the process of speculative design by helping to generate and visualize a range of possible images from the future, allowing co-creators to rapidly explore and experiment with alternative future visions.
Artificial Intelligence has been gaining momentum as generative AI tools such as the free version of ChatGPT or Dall-E by Open AI were launched to the large public in the turning of year 2023. At the same time AI-powered tools have also been receiving a lot of critical discourse from topics such as copyright, human-vs-AI creativity and narrow representation of human diversity.
To explore the above question, we conducted a public workshop for citizens of Helsinki and Espoo to explore how an image generator tool like Midjourney can help to envision future images of the cities.
Merging the best of analog and digital methods in a futuring workshop
The goal of the workshop was to facilitate collaborative futuring in the local urban context by inviting the public to envision glimpses from the future. The main idea was to combine analog workshop methods with new digital AI tools so we divided the futuring activities into two parts: 1. Analog world building and 2. digital world visualizing.
In the first part of the workshop, groups were introduced to pre-selected “What-if” questions dated to the year 2040. The What-if questions were developed by Marika Taipalus in collaboration with the City of Espoo to imagine desirable urban futures of the Espoo region in Finland.
Example prompts given to participants:
What if the city was built for more than human species?
What if all the premises of apartment buildings were shared?
Based on the What-if prompts groups immersed in future world building exercises. The exercises were adopted from the Futures Bazaar toolkit developed by futurists Filippo Cuttica and Stuart Candy. Parts of the toolkit exercises were selected and modified to fit the workshop.
The first exercise of world building was to imagine the political, economic, social, technological and environmental consequences of the What-if questions. Following this, a “thing” from that future was imagined. This was done with traditional pen and paper style by drawing and writing. We provided a list of example “things” related to the urban environment as inspiration (e.g. traffic sign, building, outdoor activity, community event). The groups voted on the best thing from the future and worked on a text prompt to be fed into AI for visualization.
The second part of the workshop was reserved for getting to know MidJourney tool and trying out different text prompts for visualizations. We encouraged participants to use the AI as a conversation and design tool through iterating and rewriting the text prompts.
The following images are results from the workshop:
Our reflections on using AI for futuring
AI brings speed to visualizing high quality images while adding an element of surprise. Coming up with a good text prompt for a desired visual outcome is the most challenging part of utilizing AI. The workshop provided well-thought steps for this as a basis. Combining analog ideation that pushes thinking forward and helps groups to brainstorm ideas, then using these ideas and focusing on one specific aspect of it and only after that writing the text prompt to feed into the AI that is then able to generate multiple visualizations. Without the previous steps, there is a risk that the outcomes are generic images without much new thought.
Communication with AI requires us to learn a new, unfamiliar language. This language of “text prompting” can be learnt best through trial and error by sending prompts and seeing what the AI creates out of it. Some errors can be seen in the images from the workshop. For example, there are misshapen human faces and a complete misunderstanding of the idea of human generated energy in the image “Tram powered by people”.
At the moment we are still quite limited in our creativity by only using text as an input modality. Midjourney offers already options of incorporating photographs in the creation of visuals but we would imagine using sketches or even sounds as a prompt input.
Overall the workshop participants had very little to no experience at all with using generative AI visualization tools or doing future speculation. Exploring new methods and tools as well as the discussions within the groups were experienced as enriching and inspiring. The process itself was seen as more meaningful than the actual visual AI outcomes. One of the participants described the experience as ‘mind-bending’.
Authors: Emilia Kiialainen and Tim Moesgen
References:
Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11–35.
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT press.
Thanks to all our volunteers Ya-Yu, Jessica, Janna, Lu and Liisi, workshop facilitators Tim, Valeska, Joona and Emilia, as well as Marika Taipalus and the City of Espoo for collaboration! Also, thanks to Damiano Cerrone for giving a workshop keynote about UrbanistAI!
More info about the chapter
Speculative Futures Helsinki is a community for futures enthusiasts. It is a platform for speculating alternative futures and imagining desirable futures. Speculative Futures Helsinki organizes open meetups and events where futures thinking, futures literacy, speculations, imagination of alternative futures and experimentation of new tools and methods are brought into the local context and enabled in an open and creative atmosphere.
