Design Fiction creates material artifacts that serve as evidence of possible futures, originating from science fiction's concept of diegetic prototypes. Like Star Trek's Tricorder, these objects tell stories about future worlds and their values. Design Fiction finds practical applications in product design, policy development, and strategic planning.
Speculative Design was developed to a degree at and through the Royal College of Art's Design Interactions program, which came out of the Interaction Design program. It (Speculative Design) functions as a kind of challenge existing systems, largely to ways of being. For example, projects like United Micro Kingdoms use provocative scenarios to question technological progress and social structures. While Design Fiction works within existing systems to explore futures, Speculative Design aims to disrupt and critique them. These are rough categorizations and its important to note that there is extensive generative cross talk between these two practices and their practitioners. The debate about which and why is largely academic, and the practices themselves...