What Is Speculative Design? Create Questions for the Future

As business and society change faster, solving only the problems visible today is not enough. Customer values, ways of working, technology, and relationships with regions gradually change. What feels convenient now may become a source of anxiety in a few years. Companies therefore need less the power to predict the future and more the power to question what is taken for granted today. Symptoms such as the company's appeal not being communicated or the value of a new business not being understood may arise from speaking about the future through past assumptions.

Speculative design imagines possible futures and considers what problems would appear if those futures arrived. The important point is not to get the future right. It is to use future hypotheses to review how we think and choose today. For example, imagine a future where a region's population declines, the meaning of movement changes, or workplaces become dispersed. From there, a company can ask what it should protect and what it should change now. This is an important design of questions before vision development and brand definition.

Design thinking is strong at solving the problem in front of us. It observes users, builds hypotheses, and approaches better solutions through testing. Future-question design, on the other hand, considers what should be seen as the problem in the first place. Neither is the only correct approach. First, future questions expand assumptions, and then design thinking turns them into concrete experiences. With this order, work can connect not only to short-term improvement, but also to long-term business value and brand strategy.

Management does not need only to speak about a distant future. It needs to change today's choices through future hypotheses. If customers come to choose sharing over ownership, what should the business value? If the entrance to a region changes from transportation to experience, what role should a facility have? If meaning becomes more important than conditions in hiring, what should the company communicate? These questions become decision criteria for rebranding and new business. Imagining the future is a way to face decisions in the present.

In the PROJECTS case Hakodate Airport, BOEL redefined a regional airport not as a facility only for transportation, but as the first place where people encounter the Hakodate region. The project's future view of the airport was not limited to traffic function. It reframed the airport as an entrance for experiencing regional culture and atmosphere. This is also a practice of turning future questions into brand experience. If an airport becomes an entrance to a region, what should it communicate, in what order should people feel it, and what kind of journey should it lead to? When the question changes, the experience design changes as well.

First, write down present assumptions: customers think this way, the region moves this way, workers choose this way. Next, imagine a future where those assumptions change. Population, technology, values, and the environment can serve as clues. Third, ask what would become a problem if that future arrived. Finally, choose what needs to be decided now from that question. The imagined future should connect to dialogue across departments. What should be re-communicated in the next website renewal? How should the recruiting message change? Which part of the product experience should be reviewed? When questions fall into action, future hypotheses become tools for judgment.

BOEL does not see speculative design as a story about a distant future. We see it as a design for companies to question present assumptions, choose which future to pursue, and decide what to protect without changing. Vision Making puts a not-yet-formed future into words. Design the Decision turns that future into decisions for today's business, organization, and experience. Asking about the future is not an escape from reality. It is a way to take responsibility for the choices made now.