Speculative Design — Beyond Design Thinking

Definition & Origins

The word “speculative” means thoughtful, reflective, or concerned with possibilities. Speculative Design, therefore, is a design approach that does not aim to provide immediately usable solutions, but instead focuses on imagining future scenarios and possibilities.

It is used to explore social, political, technological, and ethical issues, and to generate new ideas and perspectives. In essence, Speculative Design investigates what the future could be through the lens of design. Its purpose is to help us understand the present more deeply from a future-oriented perspective, enabling better decision-making today.

Speculative Design was proposed in 2009 by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, then teaching at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. It became widely known through their book Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.

In the book, Speculative Design is described as a practice driven by imagination, one that seeks to offer new perspectives on so-called “wicked problems.” It creates spaces for debate and dialogue about possible ways of living, encouraging people to expand their imagination freely. Design hypotheses can act as catalysts for redefining our relationship with reality.

Purpose, Features & How It Differs from Traditional Design

Today, the scope of what we call “design” has become extremely broad. It includes spatial design such as architecture, graphic design such as posters and brochures, web design, and experience design that shapes user experiences. Design is now deeply embedded in our daily lives.

Speculative Design goes beyond the idea of design as a means of solving present-day problems. It extends design toward the question of how the future itself might be shaped.

Behind this shift are rapid changes in society: the emergence and development of new technologies, environmental transformations, and a world so complex that even the near future is increasingly difficult to predict.

However, it is important not to misunderstand the purpose of Speculative Design.

Basic Principles of Speculative Design

・It focuses not on solving problems, but on raising questions.
・It depicts “what if” worlds related to the future of technology and society.
・It creates a sense of discomfort within familiar everyday life, prompting people to think.
・It gives users room to make choices and encourages dialogue.

The concept of Speculative Design emerged in the early 2000s. In the broader field of design, however, Design Thinking is the more widely used concept.

Design Thinking refers to the methods and mindset designers use to solve problems. In some cases, it refers to the entire process of observing and analyzing customer needs, developing hypotheses, creating prototypes, and repeatedly conducting user testing in order to develop products or services.

There is a significant difference between Design Thinking and Speculative Design.

Design Thinking focuses on how to solve the problems we face today.
Speculative Design, by contrast, asks what the problem actually is in the first place.

The key differences are found in timeframe, purpose, and the way questions are framed.

・Timeframe: Design Thinking focuses on the present, while Speculative Design focuses on the future.
・Purpose: Design Thinking is about problem-solving, while Speculative Design is about problem-posing.
・Question: Design Thinking asks “How?”, while Speculative Design asks “What if?”

Example: Mobility in an Aging Society
If the theme is mobility challenges in an aging society:

・Design Thinking: Designing an autonomous taxi interface that is easy for elderly users to use.
・Speculative Design: Creating a prototype of a future in which elderly people converse with autonomous vehicles to ease loneliness.

Dunne & Raby “Foragers” (2010)

Foragers is a project presented in 2010 by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. It visualizes a future world shaped by food shortages, where people wear devices that allow them to efficiently consume plants through genetic modification and external digestion.
The project explores the possibility of urban people evolving into “foragers” in response to future food crises.

Background and Purpose

・By 2050, the world population is expected to exceed nine billion, making food shortages a major issue.
・The project imagines a future of individual food procurement, beyond genetically modified crops or large-scale agriculture.

Approach

・It presents a hypothetical lifestyle in which humans gather food from natural environments and process or digest it through their bodies and tools.
・It includes fictional tools and garments, such as portable fermentation devices for “digesting outside the stomach” and equipment for efficiently harvesting and processing seaweed.

Characteristics

・The project is not intended for actual product commercialization.
・Instead, it encourages discussion around the idea that “such a future could exist.”
・It questions the ethical and cultural dimensions of society and technology through design.

Superflux「Mitigation of Shock」

Mitigation of Shock is an installation by Superflux, a design studio led by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern. Set in a future London affected by severe climate change, it recreates a full-scale domestic interior and shows how everyday life might change under conditions of crisis.

The work presents self-sufficiency, alternative energy, and forced lifestyle changes, inviting visitors to experience questions around sustainability in a tangible way.

Background and Purpose

・It visualizes realistic changes in near-future urban life, such as food shortages and infrastructure breakdown.
・It transforms abstract climate risks into an issue that feels immediate and present.

Approach

・The project constructs a fictional apartment room containing hydroponic shelves, power-generation devices, canned food reserves, educational videos, and climate-adaptation recipe books.
・Visitors walk through the space and experience a realistic version of everyday life in 2050.

Characteristics

・Through realistic prototypes, it allows people to physically sense the texture and constraints of future life.
・It encourages discussion about decarbonization and resilience.

Near Future Laboratory「Design Fiction」

Near Future Laboratory is a studio founded by Julian Bleecker and others, working within the context of Speculative Design. Their approach is known as Design Fiction.

Using fictional product catalogs, advertisements, and media from possible futures, they depict future scenarios with a sense of everyday reality, revealing the gap between those futures and our present.

Background and Purpose

・The studio explores social and cultural changes brought about by technological progress through thought experiments.
・It visualizes and materializes alternative futures that can influence present-day decision-making.

アプローチ

・It creates fictional product advertisements, user manuals, flyers, news programs, and other media.
・Examples include a postal service that physically delivers spam emails, or hypothetical future devices related to quantified selves.

Characteristics

・It uses a documentary-like style that encourages viewers to imagine: “What if this future had already arrived?”
・Through prototypes, video, and multimedia formats, it gives observers the feeling that such a future might be real.

These examples do not aim to predict the future. Rather, they function as devices for thinking about the future, offering policymakers, companies, and citizens new values and choices.

Compared to standard design processes (idea generation → research → ideation → prototype → test), speculative design adds two extra steps:

・Exploration: Explore new technologies, cultural shifts, current issues, to imagine the future.
・Visualization: Use sketches, storyboards, prototypes to materialize the ideas.

So you move from a future hypothesis → question → fiction → dialogue, always with an axis of “future looking back to present.”

Speculative design is being applied in education, corporate R&D, and public policy.

Education:

Universities and design schools use it to train future thinking; workshops explore “2050’s jobs” and prompt students to imagine futures in STEM education with themes such as climate change, AI ethics, gender, etc.

Corporate / R&D:

Companies use speculative design to examine how new technology might impact society: e.g., in the automotive industry imagining future mobility; companies like Philips developed “Design Probes” to explore medical/food/lifestyle futures 10-20 years ahead.

Government / Public Policy:

Administrative bodies use speculative design for citizen participation and visioning: e.g., the UK government’s Foresight Programme and the city of Barcelona’s Design for City Making initiative. In Japan, ministries use future-citizen stories for smart city or regional revitalisation projects.

Limits

Although speculative design is about imagining futures, it still needs a realistic basis. Scenarios that ignore current reality are meaningless. For example, even designing a 2030 hotel room must consider technologies that could realistically exist.

So while the focus is future-oriented, the grounding in present context is vital.

Future

We expect speculative design to be used more widely across fields as technology and social change accelerate.

Explorations into AI ethics, autonomous driving’s impact on cities and employment, and the blending of virtual/real worlds like the metaverse are all likely themes. Speculative design offers strong potential for such explorations.

If design thinking is a tool for addressing today’s problems, then speculative design is like a sensor for questions we haven’t yet seen. It stimulates creative thought, helps us think beyond existing frameworks, and can be applied when creating as-yet nonexistent products or services or rethinking what already is.

The future is not for us to predict, but to engage in dialogue and make choices. That’s why speculative design is needed.

Ref：
・Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, “Speculative Everything” (MIT Press, 2013) Superflux
・Near Future Laboratory, ““What Is Design Thinking?” — IDEO Japan (MIT Press, 2013)
・Near Future Laboratory, IDEAS FOR GOOD “What Is Speculative Design — Definition and Meaning”
・「THE BASICS YOU NEED TO KNOW & UNDERSTAND ABOUT SPECULATIVE DESIGN」：Pradipto Chakrabarty