Forget Artefacts. Design Speculative Lifeworlds instead!

Published in

unintended stories

4 min readMay 21, 2021

Aka the workshop we ran at IxD21

On February 2nd, Giovanni Caruso, Silvio Cioni and I ran a workshop during IXD21 Interaction week where we experimented design techniques to envision speculative worlds starting from chosen fictional artefacts.

Why we ran a speculative workshop at IxD21

In the last years, we have witnessed to the spreading of speculative and futures-oriented practices at the convergence of design and futures studies that can help practitioners widen their design perspectives and extend their toolbox for designing alternative futures beyond user-centred approach.

Emerging Design Attitudes: Speculative, Transitional, and Pluriversal Design

Go beyond Cartesian Belief System in the 21st Century

uxplanet.org

With the spread of future-oriented practices, new approaches have emerged that explore how Speculative Design and Design Fiction can be used to more explicitly focus on the broader social, technical, and political worlds in which speculative artefacts exist. These approaches go beyond immediate moments of use to explore speculative worlds and the different impacts of technologies as well as the maintenance and repair operations required to keep these artefacts working.

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds [Paper Talk]

We ask how speculative design can be used to more explicitly raise questions about the broader social and political…

medium.com

Drawing from the mentioned perspective and approach, in our workshop we engaged participants to experiment a new approach, by exploring speculative design and design fiction practices and moving from the centricity of the artefact to adopt the lenses of speculative worlds.

What we did during the workshop

To kick off the workshop, we provided a short introduction about design futures and design fiction practices and the approaches we were about to experiment.

Participants were then divided into two teams.
Per each group we pre-selected one artefact from the future

Uninvited guest, Superflux 2015

and Camera Restricta, Philipp Schmitt, 2016

The workshop was structured into two parts.

PART 1: IMAGINED WORLD

Participants were introduced to their artefacts and were asked to collaboratively build a common image of the future by mapping the key characteristics of the world the artefact inhabits in relation to four different areas: Economic, Political, Social and Technological. The aim of the activity was to move the focus from the artefact to the world it might inhabit by identifying those traits that must be true for the artefact itself to work.

PART 2: STORIES FROM ELSEWHERE

Participants were asked to build everyday narratives to evoke the world they had imagined. We asked them to choose three of the characteristics previously mapped and one activity (i.e. travelling, eating, reading,….) and to write a short story that describes how a day might look like in the imagined world.

Stories from elsewhere exercise Miro boards

At the end of the activities, we asked participants to share their stories and to share their feelings about the imagined world and how the original artefact provided, might have evolved accordingly.

You can read all the stories that have been generated following this link

Now What

Giovanni, Silvio and I are keeping to research and test methods and approaches to explore and reflect on alternative visions of the future starting from fictional artefacts.

In 2020, we initiated a community-based research lab called unintended, experimenting at the intersection of design, systems and futures.
Taking a systemic design-led and futures-oriented approach, unintended wants to empower people to critically question the world today and imagine more inclusive and desirable visions of the future.

Check out unintended medium page and stay tuned for new updates.