The class opened with a clip from Knight Rider, which Kyle used as a jumping-off point for speculative design. The idea being that fiction has always been ahead of product design, things that seemed fantastical in one era become engineering problems in the next.
There was also a BBC clip from 1966 where 13 year olds were asked what life would look like in the year 2000. What was interesting wasn't how wrong they were but how political their answers were, they weren't just imagining gadgets, they were imagining social structures. That feels relevant to the Future Living brief. A smart home OS concept isn't just a technology question, it's a question about how people want to live and what they want their relationship with technology to actually be.
1966: Children imagine life in the year 2000 | Tomorrow’s World | Past Predictions | BBC Archive
The Futures Cone was introduced as a framework for thinking about possible, plausible, probable, and preferable futures. It's a useful tool for speculative design because it stops the work from being purely fantastical — you have to locate your concept somewhere on that spectrum and be able to justify it.
For the Future Living brief, this framework is directly applicable. A smart home OS set in the near future needs to sit in the plausible or probable zone to feel meaningful. If it's too far out it becomes science fiction. If it's too grounded it just becomes a slightly better version of what already exists.
Speculative design as a discipline is about debating the implications of technology before it happens rather than after. That feels important right now given how quickly things are actually moving.
The Futures Cone, use and history
design today is concerned primarily with commercial and marketing activities, it could operate on a more intellectual level. speculative design allows us to debate the implications of different technologies futures before they happen.
Pros and cons of speculative design.
tool exploration useful for speculative design, we shape the tools and the tools shape us.
identify future concerns
Societal concerns. Japan stagnating, where does speculative design fit here?