I used to think speculative design was just architects sketching impossible buildings.
Turns out, it’s something messier—a philosophy that asks us to imagine futures we don’t necesarily want, just to understand what choices we’re making right now. Speculative design emerged in the 1960s and 70s, though the term itself got popularized around 2013 by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art in London. They weren’t interested in making products people would buy; they wanted to make objects that provoked questions. Like, wait—what if our phones could predict our deaths? What if meat was grown from celebrity tissue samples? These aren’t solutions. They’re thought experiments, dressed up as prototypes, designed to make you uncomfortable enough to think differently about technology, ethics, consumption, the whole tangled mess of modern life.
The core idea is that design doesn’t have to be affirmative—it doesn’t have to say “yes” to the world as it is. Critical design, a close cousin, takes this further by actively critiquing existing systems through objects and scenarios. Honestly, the line between speculative and critical design gets blurry, and even practitioners argue about definitions.
Here’s the thing: these designers aren’t trying to predict the future accurately, the way futurists or tech companies claim to.
When Design Becomes a Form of Philosophical Inquiry and Provocation
Instead, they’re creating what Dunne and Raby call “preferable futures” versus “probable” or “possible” ones. Probable futures are what trend forecasters talk about—extrapolations from current data. Possible futures include wild cards, stuff that could happen but probably won’t. Preferable futures, though, are normative; they ask what we actually want, what values should guide us. Speculative design sits in this space, using fictional scenarios to reveal our assumptions. I’ve seen projects that imagine surveillance systems so extreme they make you realize how much tracking we already accept. Or prosthetics that enhance abilities beyond “normal,” forcing us to confront what we mean by disability or improvement. The discomfort is the point.
The Uncomfortable Space Between What Exists and What Could Exist
Critics say speculative design can be elitist, stuck in galleries where only art-world insiders see it, divorced from real-world problems. There’s some truth there. A conceptual project about lab-grown meat doesn’t feed anyone. But defenders argue it shifts discourse, plants seeds that eventually influence policy, technology development, public debate. Maybe both are true.
The method usually involves research—ethnography, technical feasibility studies, philosophical reading—then crafting artifacts or narratives that make abstract futures tangible. You might build a fake product, shoot a mockumentary, write a fake news article from 2045. The goal is plausibility, not realism. It has to feel like it could happen, just enough to suspend disbelief and trigger reflection.
How Fictional Scenarios Reveal Our Hidden Assumptions About Progress
I guess what draws me to this approach is its humility about knowledge. Speculative designers admit they don’t have answers. They’re just asking better questions. In a world obsessed with optimization and solutions, that feels almost radical. Traditional design solves problems; speculative design questions whether we’ve defined the problem correctly in the first place.
Why Making People Uncomfortable Might Be Design’s Most Important Function
Some of the most compelling work comes from non-Western practitioners who use speculative methods to challenge colonial narratives about technology and progress. Designers in Africa, Asia, Latin America imagine futures rooted in local knowledge systems, not Silicon Valley’s vision. This diversifies what “the future” even looks like, who gets to imagine it, whose values shape it. The field’s been criticized for being too white, too European, too focused on anxieties of the privileged—critiques that have pushed it to evolve, slowly, unevenly. Anyway, the tension between provocation and practicality, between art and activism, remains unresolved. Which might be exactly the point. Speculative design isn’t supposed to offer closure. It’s supposed to keep us questioning, uncomfortable, awake to possibilities we’d otherwise ignore until they’re already here, irreversible, shaping our lives in ways we never consciously chose.
