Design Is [Speculative] Futures Design Thinking - a new toolkit for preemptive design

Main ideas, concepts, and lessons

• Speculative design (design futures) is presented as a way to manifest possibilities—not by predicting one fixed future, but by exploring multiple alternate futures.
• It helps societies and organizations prepare for “inconvenient challenges” and also see opportunities, by working through scenarios, stories, and artifacts that surface impacts, implications, and ethical questions.
• Speculative design is framed as a methodology/toolkit that:
  • Uses foresight to understand future challenges,
  • Treats the future as a cone of possibilities rather than a straight line,
  • Focuses especially on the outer/less-certain realm where imagination and “what if” exploration can reveal risks and hidden consequences.

The talk emphasizes that speculative design is not fortune-telling, and should be grounded in:

• Rigor (signals/trends, research, plausible drivers)
• Experimentation (using scenarios, prototypes, or vision videos)
• Agenda-setting (helping designers and policymakers decide what to pursue or avoid)

Multiple frameworks are provided to help practitioners structure speculative futures work, including:

• Futures cone (baseline view of what’s possible vs plausible vs probable)
• Futures wheel (map direct + downstream implications)
• Backcasting/roadmapping style milestone thinking (what must be true for a future)
• “Speculate ecosystems” (identify challenges/rules/states/implications across social, cultural, and technological layers)

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Methodologies / instructional content (detailed bullet points)

1) Understand the “cone of possibilities” framing

• Treat the future as a distribution of outcomes, not a single timeline.
• Use time horizon to reason about:
  • Outside the cone: currently implausible/extreme examples (e.g., teleportation, lightsabers—illustrative only)
  • Closer to the center: more plausible/probable developments
  • Outer possible realm: where designers should often work because it enables:
    • Imagination
    • Impact exploration
    • Implications and knock-on effects
• Example signals:
  • AI likely continues developing
  • Additional technologies (e.g., quantum computing) could accelerate changes

2) Use speculative futures artifacts and scenarios to explore impacts

• Create or analyze speculative outputs such as:
  • Stories
  • Artifacts
  • Scenarios
  • Environments/immersive exhibits
• Purpose:
  • Reveal how something might “break”
  • Surface ethical issues (e.g., privacy, data misuse)
  • Show second- and third-order consequences

3) Employ agenda-setting through multiple futures

• Don’t only ask “what will happen?”
• Also ask:
  • What future do we want?
  • What future do we want to avoid?
  • How do we navigate toward desired outcomes and avert undesired ones?
• Connect futures to policy and ethics, not just product design.
• Emphasize that many future realities will require:
  • Adjusting policies
  • Defining rules/ethics
  • Shaping social/psychological acceptance

4) Futures wheel (implications mapping) process

• Put a topic/technology/feature at the center (e.g., robotics, synthetic biology, autonomous cars).
• Expand outward to map:
  • Direct implications
  • Indirect downstream impacts
• Reframe “feature thinking”:
  • Don’t only focus on what the product does (e.g., smaller/faster/connected devices)
  • Focus on what the technology does to people, society, and governance

5) Backcasting / roadmapping-style planning

• Start from a future target.
• Then work backward to identify:
  • Milestones
  • Key elements that must become true
  • Dependencies required for arrival of the future capability/service
• Combine with futures thinking:
  • Seed multiple futures and paths
  • Evaluate how the world and governance/policies must shift

6) “Futures ecosystem” speculation

• Describe the “ecosystem” of the future:
  • Challenges
  • Rules/states of the world
  • Technology trajectories
  • Social and cultural implications
• Determine:
  • Designers’ societal role beyond the product
  • Whether designers become de facto policymakers/ethics shapers

7) Organizational change method: “evangelize” ethically using internal alignment

To bring future design/ethics into practice:

• Understand the organization’s values (what leadership cares about)

• Anchor the message to stakeholder goals (example: airlines care about “tickets and butts,” i.e., customers)

• Create champions internally

• Use experiments and vision videos/scenarios to build a new agenda
• Include “hidden impact / ecosystem influence”:
  • Risks and opportunities
  • Second-order effects
  • Privacy/data and other ethical concerns

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Examples used to explain speculative design (what each illustrates)

• Design for an Overpopulated Planet (Foragers) (2007-ish)
  • Prompted by claims of needing large food output increases
  • Explores a speculative response using chemical/biological approaches and animal-like nutrient foraging
• Love Optimized / Neural Line (MIT Media Lab)
  • A smart-home/smart-meter-like service that adjusts utilities based on perceived relationship/compatibility or closeness (based on sensor impulses/connection)
• One-way Ticket (Joseph Popper)
  • Investigates the human experience and psychological/logistical challenges of a one-way space mission (capsule imagined with low-tech materials)
• Martian Wine (Carlos/“Mentor” project)
  • Questions feasibility of growing/producing wine in Mars conditions via soil emulation and fermentation methods
• Bathing/Drying unit ideas (Mars everyday life)
  • Focus on mundane survival routines and how design alters daily activities on other planets
• Body adaptation/ethics (Agnes/Haynes project)
  • Imagines modifying children for hotter climates, including ethical concerns
• Bacteria programming and materials (Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg / related concepts)
  • Uses biological systems to create responsive color/behavior outputs; includes an imagined sensor-tuned material system
• Eco-Maya (living color evolution over a century)
  • Projects a pathway where living organisms become a technology for sensing/diagnostics (e.g., colored output for disease detection)
• Genetically personalized car (Lexus + 23andMe vision)
  • Illustrates high-risk/ethics-laden personalization based on DNA (services matched to genetic markers)
• UK Government “Future of Aging” workshops (2015)
  • Uses scenarios to elicit public opinions on future public/private services
  • Demonstrates speculative design as government practice for longer time horizons
• Dubai “Museum of the Future” / immersive exhibits (tilt/other orgs)
  • Immersive future environments to invite public reaction and influence direction of tech development
• Apple / “Knowledge Navigator” vision video
  • Shows how devices and assistants assemble from previously emerging research trends over time
• Google “selfish ledger” vision video (leaked internal concept)
  • Describes a goal-driven ledger that selects or builds solutions by discovering missing user preference data—sparking debate about creepy implications

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Education/participation and community efforts described

• The speaker’s organization (Design Futures Initiative) is described as:
  • Hosting speculative futures meetups worldwide
  • Organizing Primer conference (annual gathering)
  • Running workshops pairing subject-matter experts (e.g., biotech, plant genomics) with designers to prototype speculative future concepts

Workshop/workspace examples include:

• AI-driven health clinic pods concepting
• Personal carbon economy / carbon marketplace visualization
• Youth program using futures frameworks with Boys & Girls Club to explore life/career/social challenges and build coping/problem-framing capacity

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Core message (closing lesson)

• Designers should use speculative futures thinking not merely for “imagining,” but for:
  • Societal impact
  • Ethical challenges
  • Proactive policymaking
• The future is framed as something people can shape—especially those capable of imagining responsibly.

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Speakers / sources featured (as mentioned)

Speaker(s)

• Phil Bollock (main speaker)

Organizational sources / entities referenced

• Design Futures Initiative (nonprofit; meetups + Primer conference)
• Primer conference (organized by the Design Futures Initiative)
• Google (host/series context; referenced in “design futures” examples and speculative video references)
• McKinsey (Phil’s day job: design director)
• GE Aviation (Phil’s prior work)
• Parsons The New School (Eliot P Montgomery is a professor; credited for a mapping diagram)
• MIT Media Lab (e.g., Love Optimized/Neural Line-style example)
• Royal College of Art (referenced in relation to critical design and projects)
• Central Saint Martins (referenced in relation to multiple student/designer projects)
• UK Government (2015 “Future of Aging” study)

Specific example creators / names mentioned

• Eliot P Montgomery (Parsons professor; diagram mapping different speculative-related terms)
• Anthony Diamond (credited in the “Design for an Overpopulated Planet” reference alongside Fiona Ray/beam)
• Joseph Popper (“One-way Ticket”)
• Carlos (implied name in “Martian wine” project; described as producing Mars wine experiment)
• Scott Kelly (astronaut quote about the sensory value of water)
• Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg (bacteria/color/materials example and eco-maya-related storytelling)
• Agnes Haynes (name appears in relation to body adaptation/ethics concept)
• Andrew Harris (strategy director referenced in relation to Museum of the Future exhibit feedback)
• Paola Antonelli (speaker mentioned for the upcoming Primer conference in New York)
• Robert Jordan (character name in the “Knowledge Navigator” vision-video scenario)
• Jill Gilbert (character name in the “Knowledge Navigator” vision-video scenario)
• David she couldn’t… (speaker name unclear due to subtitle errors; laughter/seriousness transition context)

Technologies / companies / projects referenced as examples or scenarios

• 23andMe
• Lexus
• Volvo (autonomous-car fatality story in Tempe, Arizona)
• Near-Future Labs (hosted a workshop about futures wheel / QuickStart guide)
• Hyper mind / UAE hyper mine (referenced in relation to Mood View marketing line)
• Carbon-related marketplace / Carbon Pickers (personal carbon economy project described)
• Chanel (algae suit / “for skin farming” reference)
• Alexa / Siri / knowledge navigator / IoT / quantum computing / Moore’s Law (referenced conceptually)

Captured events / policy references

• AI/privacy and data concerns (as motivating theme)
• Dubai Museum of the Future / “Future Dubai Foundation” (mentioned as permanent organization)
• Moore’s Law (as framework for accelerating change)

Music

• [Music] (no specific composer/track identified)