Speculative design, explained for scientists

Speculative design makes things that do not exist yet, not to sell them but to think with them. A prosthetic organ that filters air pollution for a child, an insurance policy for a self-grown house, a ritual for retiring a living material: these are proposals, built as objects, images or scenarios, whose purpose is to make a possible future concrete enough to argue about.

Scientists are often uneasy with this. The objects are not real, the claims are not tested, and the work can look like science fiction with better typography. The unease is reasonable, and the practice is still worth learning, because it does something that laboratories do not.

What it is for

Research produces capabilities. It rarely asks, in a structured way, what the world should do with them. Speculative design is a method for asking. By building a plausible artifact from a plausible future, it lets a room full of people, including the people who would live in that future, react to it before it arrives. Those reactions are data of a kind: about values, fears, assumptions and who gets left out.

In biodesign, this matters because the field's materials are powerful and its consequences are uncertain. A team that only asks "can we grow a building" will build a worse building than a team that also asks "who lives in it, who maintains it, and what happens when it dies."

The conditions

Speculative work earns its place when it is disciplined:

• It is grounded. The science behind the proposal is real, cited and understood. The speculation is in the application, not the mechanism.
• It is specific. A vague future is unarguable. A particular object, in a particular place, used by a particular person, invites objection, which is the point.
• It is honest about its status. A speculative object is labeled as one. It never pretends to be a working prototype or a product.
• It is open to being wrong. The best speculative projects document the reactions they provoked, including hostile ones, and change in response.

How to start

Take a finding from a paper you admire. Write three scenarios, ten years out, in which that finding has been applied: one you would want, one you would fear, and one you cannot decide about. Pick the third. Make the artifact that would exist in that world, as simply as you can: a label, an instruction leaflet, a photograph of the object in use. Show it to five people and write down what they say.

That exercise takes a week and teaches a way of thinking that research on its own rarely does.