Using design to speculate how things could be.
A new term we've been taught recently, speculative design is a type of critical design practice, which was coined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Speculative design aims to not solve current problems, but attempt to look into the future and see how our current issues may affect the world later down the line.
Examples include the Human Interference Task Force - an organisation that arose in 1984 with one question in mind: How can we alert humans generations from now about nuclear waste that is buried underground, as to avoid them being harmed by accidentally coming across it? On paper this question seems easily answered. But thinking about how quickly we evolve and adapt to new forms of communication, who is to say that we won't have adopted new methods of communication in over a century's time? New facial gestures, new hand signs, new icons, new colour associations, etc.?
Although this question was posed over 35 years ago, answers are to this day still being generated to try and properly satisfy the issue at hand. Whilst speculative design aims to answer questions that have yet to even exist or be a problem, answers are so much harder to come up with without knowledge of how much everything will change in the future.
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