With this project allowing us to explore speculative design, I wanted to take some time to explore some up-and-coming technology and the concept of speculative design as a whole.
Speculative design is an approach to design that focuses on imagining future scenarios and possibilities. Speculative design is actually a commonplace concept, appearing in almost all sci-fi movies, but also has real-life applications outside of fiction. The point of speculative design is not to predict the future, but to offer an idea of what the future could look like, and to address future challenges early on. To explore this concept further, I read “Speculative Everything” by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and read some articles about the topic.
There are three main factors when considering speculative design, which are; The Probable - what exists now that will still exist; The Plausible - what could exist in the future based on what exists now; and; The Possible - what could exist at extremes of what is scientifically possible. What I found interesting about this and something I want to consider is that speculative design needs to be backed and reasoned. Speculative Design is not an excuse to throw in whatever science fiction or fantasy you want, and this is important for me to remember if I do explore speculative design in this project.
Another point about Speculative Design I found interesting was how it fitted into the design process. Speculative Design requires two additional steps “Exploration” and “Visualisation”. The “Exploration” is the investigation into emerging technology and trends, to see what could happen in the future, while the “Visualisation” is about creating concept images of what the proposed design could be due to the technology not currently existing. This was really interesting to me as I hadn’t previously considered how speculative design fits into the process but this makes a lot of sense to me and is something I will endeavour to do when I explore speculative design in the future.
THE BASICS YOU NEED TO KNOW AND UNDERSTAND ABOUT SPECULATIVE DESIGN
The Apple Vision Pro has just been released to a mixed reception but I think it’s important for me to consider technology like this as this will most likely be the sort of platform I’ll be designing for in the future. While it may be limited at the moment, the technology and functionality behind the Vision Pro are immense and have incredible potential for the future. Being able to render all this content in a spatial environment opens the doors for what space is actually required for certain things. In particular, I’m thinking of things like how full hospitals can get, how short home nurse visits can be, and how hard it can be to get a GP appointment. I think VR/AR could be a really interesting place to take this project due to it’s ability to transform spaces and make for a much more personal computing experience.
I became aware of the Future Interfaces Group last year and find them to be a great source of inspiration for future and speculative design. Being mainly technologically focused, FIG created new ways for people to interact with computers, for example, through sensors placed on walls to tell when someone gestures. It relates back to the concept of the Vision Pros spatial computing and creating an interactable environment. I think this could be a great source of inspiration for this project as a lot of their unconventional projects could have great benefits to people who have different needs when it comes to physically interacting with things.
