Entry 6 - Speculative Design

In week 4 our professor delivered a lecture on ARUP Global Foresight using slides prepared by Lauren Davies and Sarah Bushnell from ARUP's Global Foresight team. The session introduced speculative design as a taught practice and shifted how we thought about responding to the brief.

The key lesson I learned from this class was the distinction between foresight and forecasting. Forecasting assumes the future will look like the present, continuing to trend upwards. However, foresight is a way of thinking about the future and its uncertainty in a deeper more strategic way. The presentation showed a chart of US vehicle miles travelled with every forecast from 2002 to 2010 predicting stable growth, however the forecasts were wrong by not predicting the rise of ride sharing apps and changing attitudes to driving amongst younger generations. This inaccuracy wasn't because of forecasters' lack of knowledge, they were just looking at the future by first looking at the present rather than first thinking about the future and working back.

Relating this back to our project, the brief wasn't asking us to design an improved version of something that existed but to imagine a new relationship between museum visitors, children in our case, and the ecological data. As Kolehmainen (2016) writes, speculative design raises 'what if?' questions about the future, like, what if there ought to be a change? What if things were different? These are the types of questions we need to ask.

The presentation asked us to take part in two practical exercises. The Drivers of Change card sort asked us to identify STEEPLe factors, social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal factors) and map them by importance and uncertainty for our project. I found this similar to the PESTLE analysis but now we were thinking about future uncertainty not just the current landscape. The factors that were most important for our project were: Social - A growing concern about children's disconnection with nature Economic - Uncertainty about how public institutions fund scientific engagement.

I found the second exercise extremely helpful with the idea generation process. We had to imagine it was 2050 and we were walking to the NHM when we picked up a newspaper and found a story about our project on the front page. This is the headline we went with:

Natural History Museum Garden Data Project Transforms How Children Connect With Nature — Sensor Network Behind London's Most Visited Museum Becomes One of the UK's Biggest Citizen Science Initiatives.

This exercise forced us to commit to an idea, even just for this task, and writing the headline gave us clarity about what we wanted our concept to achieve. This newfound clarity fed directly into ideation.

Di Salvo (2009) writes that design can contribute to making the conditions and consequences of an issue visible. This framing felt extremely relevant to what we were trying to do with this project. We didn't yet have the concept at this point but we had a clearer sense of what we needed to do.

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Di Salvo, C. (2009) Design and The Construction of Publics.

Kolehmainen, I. (2016) Speculative Design. NESTA.