Case studies I: speculative practice
Five projects that brought the future into a street, a shop, a museum, a home and a cinema.
What’s this about?
After six articles of theory, it is time to look at work. I have picked five speculative projects made between 2007 and 2020. They differ in budget, scale and medium, from guerrilla signs in Honolulu to an animated film in Melbourne. For each one I ask the same five questions: what was the context, what question did it pose, what was the artefact, how was it received, and what can we criticise. You can reuse this simple framework for any project you come across.
Read on if you:
- Want concrete examples of speculative design to show a client, a student or a sceptical colleague
- Are curious how the setting of a project shapes what people take away from it
- Want to see the critique next to the praise
- Are looking for a quick way to analyse speculative projects yourself
Speculative design has an image problem. For many people it means beautiful objects on plinths in London galleries, admired mostly by the people who make them. Part of that reputation is earned, and we will come back to it in the ninth article. But the field is wider than its most photographed exhibitions. The five projects below show how differently one ambition can be realised: to make a possible future tangible enough that people start arguing about it.
1. FoundFutures: Chinatown (Honolulu, 2007)
Context. In 2006, futurists Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, then at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, founded FoundFutures, a public art and futures initiative. They had been experimenting with what they called guerrilla futures: slipping artefacts from the future into everyday places without asking permission first, for example “droplifting” future products onto the shelves of local shops.
Question. What might happen to Honolulu’s Chinatown, and how do the people who live and work there feel about those possibilities?
Artefact. Candy and Dunagan interviewed residents and business owners, built a set of scenarios from what they heard, and turned them into installations in the streets of the neighbourhood. One set of signs announced the arrival of American chain stores and luxury apartments, giving shape to a fear of gentrification that people rarely voiced in public. Another imagined a flu epidemic, echoing the plague outbreak that ended with much of Chinatown burned around 1900. A third asked what becomes of Chinatowns in a world where China is the leading superpower. The project closed with a free community workshop.
Reception. The gentrification scenario landed on the front page of Hawaii’s daily newspaper. Within the futures community the project became a milestone in the development of experiential and guerrilla futures.
Critique. Unsolicited interventions raise questions of consent. A resident who walks past a fake announcement about their own street did not sign up for a provocation, and a scenario about disease or displacement can hurt. Candy himself later described guerrilla work as one end of a spectrum: useful when official processes are too timid, but not a mode for every situation.
2. 99¢ Futures (Brooklyn, 2013)
Context. The Extrapolation Factory is a studio founded by Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken, both graduates of the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art. Their aim was to take the tools of professional futures research out of think tanks and give them to anyone.
Question. What would you find on the shelves of a 99 cent store in the future?
Artefact. In February 2013, around 40 participants spent a day at Studio-X NYC as “factory workers”. They picked forecasts from a futures database, sorted them through social, technological, economic, political and ecological lenses, wrote day-in-the-life stories and then built and packaged a product from each story. Shortly afterwards the products went on sale in a real 99 cent store and pharmacy on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, next to phone accessories, rain bonnets and toothpicks, at a one-night “time-warp opening”. Among them were Mars survival kits and DIY organ transplant kits.
Reception. Coverage from Wired to CNN, the Core77 Design Award in the speculative category in 2013, and later exhibitions abroad. The method was published in the Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual in 2016.
Critique. The retail frame is brilliant at lowering the threshold, because everyone knows how to be a shopper. But the same frame can turn futures into novelty gifts, and a good joke can end a conversation as easily as it starts one. It is also worth asking who took part. The factory workers were mostly New York creatives, not the regular customers of a discount store on Flatbush Avenue.
3. United Micro Kingdoms (London, 2013)
Context. We opened this series with this exhibition by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Design Museum in London, so here I look at it purely as a case.
Question. What if a country split into four regions, each organised around a different political and technological ideology, and each with its own idea of how people should live and move?
Artefact. Four micro-kingdoms, each told mainly through its transport. Digitarians ride algorithm-driven cars across landscapes built for machines. Bioliberals grow their vehicles. Anarcho-evolutionists modify their own bodies. Communo-nuclearists live on a vast, constantly moving nuclear-powered train. The exhibition used models, films, maps and texts, and the project lives on at unitedmicrokingdoms.org.
Reception. Wide press coverage, and a permanent place in design teaching as one of the clearest examples of design fiction at the scale of a whole society.
Critique. The four kingdoms are deliberate caricatures of ideologies, which makes them easy to read but also flattens them. More importantly, the exhibition speaks the language of the design museum and its audience. People who already enjoy thinking about futures loved it. It is much harder to show that it reached anyone else, or changed a single decision.
4. Mitigation of Shock (Barcelona, 2017)
Context. London studio Superflux, led by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, created the installation for After the End of the World, an exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) that opened in 2017.
Question. How do you make something as vast as climate change tangible and specific at the scale of everyday life?
Artefact. A complete family flat in London around 2050, adapted to a world of broken supply chains and food insecurity. Visitors walked through a home where plants grow under improvised lights, recipes in the kitchen reveal new ways of producing and storing food, newspapers and a radio show describe the tensions of the time, and a smart home hub keeps humming along as if the old world still existed. The team built it after interviews with experts from NASA, the UK Met Office and Forum for the Future. In 2019 a second version, set in a Singaporean public housing flat in 2068, opened at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.
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Reception. One of the most frequently cited examples of experiential futures of the last decade. The Singapore version showed that the format can be adapted to a different place, climate and culture rather than simply toured.
Critique. Superflux deliberately chose not to leave visitors frightened, and filled the flat with ways of coping. That is a strength, but it invites a question: does a beautifully crafted adaptation quietly suggest that people like us will manage? The home is also a relatively comfortable Western home. And an immersive installation is expensive and tied to one venue, so only a limited number of people can ever step inside.
5. Planet City (Melbourne, 2020)
Context. Liam Young, an Australian-born architect and film director based in Los Angeles, was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for the NGV Triennial 2020.
Question. What if humanity retreated from its sprawl into a single hyper-dense city and let the rest of the planet return to wilderness?
Artefact. An animated short film and a book of more than 400 pages imagining one city for ten billion people. Using the density of today’s densest cities, Young estimates that such a city could occupy around 0.02 per cent of the earth’s surface. The film follows a continuous festival procession through the city across a whole year, with costumes by Ane Crabtree. Young insists that every technology in the city already exists, and describes the project as a fiction shaped like a city rather than a proposal to be built.
Reception. Extensive coverage in architecture and design media, and a book that gathers voices from ecologists, sociologists, science fiction writers and Indigenous knowledge holders.
Critique. The image of all humanity gathered in one place, with nature set aside outside its walls, raises obvious questions. Who decides? Who has to move, and from where? The idea sits uncomfortably close to authoritarian planning, and to a long history of removing Indigenous people from land declared “wilderness”. The book includes many voices precisely to resist a single masterplan, but most people only ever see the film’s spectacular images.
What the five projects share
Looking across the five, three patterns stand out.
First, each borrows a familiar frame. A street sign, a shop shelf, a museum, a home, a film. The frame does half of the work, because visitors already know how to behave inside it.
Second, each is grounded in research. Interviews in Chinatown, a futures database in Brooklyn, climate experts in London, density data in Melbourne. Good speculative design is extrapolation, not fantasy.
Third, each ends where the real work should begin: with a conversation. And this is also their shared weakness. Few of these projects had a mechanism for carrying that conversation into decisions, budgets or institutions. That gap is exactly what transition design tries to close.
What to take away
Speculative design is not one format. It can be a sign on a lamppost or a film in a national gallery. What unites the strongest projects is a sharp question, a believable artefact and a setting that lets ordinary people step in. What they rarely have is a path from provocation to change.
When you next meet a speculative project, run it through the five questions: context, question, artefact, reception, critique. You will quickly see whether it is doing serious work or just looking good.
Coming next
In the eighth article we move from provocation to practice. Three transition projects: a water shortage in Ojai, California, a neighbourhood lab in Rotterdam, and a strategic design unit inside Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.
Sources and further reading
Projects and reports
› Dunagan, J. & Candy, S. (2007). FoundFutures: Chinatown. Project report for the Hawaii Arts Alliance.
› Candy, S. (2017). Ethnographic experiential futures. The Sceptical Futuryst. https://futuryst.blogspot.com/2017/06/ethnographic-experiential-futures.html
› The Extrapolation Factory (2013). 99¢ Futures. https://extrapolationfactory.com/99-Futures
› Montgomery, E. P. & Woebken, C. (2016). Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual.
› Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction. Design Museum, London. https://unitedmicrokingdoms.org/
› Superflux (2017). Mitigation of Shock (London). https://superflux.in/index.php/work/mitigation-of-shock/
› Superflux (2019). Mitigation of Shock (Singapore). https://superflux.in/index.php/work/mitigation-of-shock-singapore/
› Young, L. (2020). Planet City. Uro Publications, Melbourne.
› National Gallery of Victoria. Triennial profile: Liam Young. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/multimedia/triennial-liam-young/
Books and articles
› Candy, S. (2010). The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios. PhD thesis, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
› Candy, S. & Kornet, K. (2019). Turning foresight inside out: An introduction to ethnographic experiential futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3). https://jfsdigital.org/articles-and-essays/vol-23-no-3-march-2019/turning-foresight-inside-out-an-introduction-to-ethnographic-experiential-futures/
› Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.
