World-Building Methods for Speculative Design and Fiction
From “Postcards from the Future Live” event by Viraj Joshi, at Speculative Futures Rotterdam.
The Event
Speculative Futures Rotterdam, a part of the global Design Futures Initiative, kindly invited me to host a live session featuring my project “Postcards from the Future” on January 12th, 2021.
With the chapter host, Karolina Thakker, I came up with a two part event: the first half talking about what values futures-thinking in all its forms may add to our disposition as creative professionals (and as people!); and the latter half crowdsourcing and building the idea for the 31st Postcard from the Future.
What are “Postcards from the Future”?
Postcards from the Future are 31 one-image speculative visions.
From pills that correct biases, microphones that call out liars when spoken into, to gravestones with phones to speak to AI-likenesses of the deceased, they span intersections of pertinent social and technological topics like artificial intelligence, big-corps, privacy, climate change, identity, and policy.
They have been produced in a year long collaboration with designers, technologists, historians, futurists, writers, and curators I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at various walks of life. Starting with the question “What makes you curious, anxious, or excited about the future?”, the process for building each postcard was inspired from science-fiction writing, speculative design, and strategic forecasting exercises.
Graduating from the typical closed collaboration for most postcards, this event gave me the chance crowdsource the idea from dozens of participants at the event.
Final Output: “Cerebral Cybernetic Implants”
When brain interfaces connect to the internet and replace external devices like phones and computers, they become the primary way to interact with the world around us.
Might the worst of humanity and the internet infest this new frontier too? Might we also need to come up with means to protect our cerebral cybernetics — and in effect our brains — from hacking?
Our Design and Speculation Process
Over the last few years, I have produced speculative fiction through design, film, and prose outputs. A by-product of my practice has been the archival and creation of forecasting tools; borrowing from and building upon science fiction, speculative design, writing, and strategic foresight.
I picked the following exercises for this session.
1. Weak Signals
Karolina, the event host picked two intriguing articles from the news, which we used as “Weak Signals” to build our future. For spontaneity, I was kept away to them until the very session. At their simplest, Weak Signals are uncommon repeating patterns that may be precursors to upcoming trends.
2. “In A World Where” Template
Over the past two years, I have developed the “In a world where…” template for world-building. The result of this extrapolation is a sentence that describes our speculative world. It takes colloquial sentences that start with “In a world where…” and puts the user through a constrained brainstorming exercise.
The first half, “In a world where…”, is a phrase that invites participants to respond with a provocative statement that speaks about the rules of the world we are coming up with — based on the weak signals in this session.
The second half, the response to “People…”, speaks about what a commonplace reaction to our strange provocation could be. Together, this sets up the status quo of our world. For me, this has proven to be fertile grounds for design fiction artefacts, science fiction stories, or even strategic foresight outputs.
Let’s describe two of our dear fiction stories through this template:
For this session, we asked the participants to complete the phrases in this template through the chat window, and I picked one that felt the most provocative and interesting for futures thinking.
Crowdsourced Provocation – In a world where we can send designer diseases and vaccines as e-mail attachments, people will blackmail each other with diseases.
3. Artefacts, Organisations, Rituals, and more!
Once we have our speculative world, we can add plausible elements that take place in it. For this session, I had chosen an artefact, an organisation, and a ritual set in this world. Alternatively, we may also include interactions, services, anecdotes, a day in the life of, metrics, etc.
Our brilliant participants came up with the following:
4. Assimilation and Graphical Reconstruction
Taking in all the genius thoughts that came through the session, I spent some time sketching, and later putting ideas to photoshop in order to realise Postcard from the Future 31.
Here are some of my observations from the session:
Plural Fiction for Plural Futures
On laying the entire process out, we can see how one could extrapolate several narratives and objects through just this one session.
Why I think about futures
Here are some benefits I see of futures-thinking and speculation in my own discourse as a designer and technologist, and as a human.
Acknowledgements
A big thanks Karolina Thakker of Speculative Futures, Rotterdam, and all the participants of the event for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and questions through the session.
Kindly write to Karolina or me if you want access to the session video recording.
Stay tuned with Speculative Futures, Rotterdam for exciting upcoming events on their LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Follow Postcards from the Future on its own website, and my work on my Instagram or my website.
