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 are often used in concert with one another. See, for example, the work here at the Near Future Laboratory, which is a mix of both practices, and often in the same project.

This essay examines the 1968 exhibition catalog Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, a landmark exploration of how emerging technologies like computers extended human creativity. Edited by Jasia Reichardt, the catalog captured the interdisciplinary spirit of collaboration among artists, engineers, and scientists, showcasing algorithmic art, computer music, and interactive installations. By emphasizing unpredictability, process, and serendipity, the catalog aligns with contemporary ideas of Design Fiction, where technology is used to imagine speculative futures rather than deterministic solutions. Drawing parallels to AI, the essay advocates for human-machine partnerships that prioritize imagination, multiplicity, and creative exploration as a blueprint for future design and engineering practices. A cursory review of the catalog reveals a spirit of prototyping and experimentation. Many of the projects in here (from the late 1960s!) are the kinds of things that we might see today in the context of Design Fiction, speculative design, and the kinds of art+technology practices that are now becoming more common. The catalog is a historical document, a contemporary manifesto, and a guide for the creative potential of human-machine collaboration. It is a reminder that the most interesting possibilities often lie not in having machines replicate human creativity, but in discovering entirely new forms of expression that can only emerge through the collaboration between human and machine intelligence. It is also a reminder that imagination is an existentially vital way to prototype possibility and, as such, may be considered as much a means of survival as a means of invention and innovation. Without imagination, the unexpected explorations of the unknown, and the kinds of playful experimentation that one can see in the catalog, we are left with a world that is impoverished, constrained, and lacking in the kinds of surprises that make life worth living.

In Stories to Imagine Alternate Futures, Julian Bleecker and Tobias Revell craft an engaging exploration of the intersection between storytelling and speculative design, making a compelling case for narrative as a tool to reimagine the future. The essay opens by critiquing conventional approaches to foresight, which often rely on rigid frameworks of policy and data, failing to capture the messy, emotional, and subjective nature of how humans experience potential futures. Instead, the authors champion the imaginative and disruptive power of stories, arguing that they are uniquely capable of breaking through entrenched assumptions about what lies ahead.

Bleecker and Revell point to the practice of Design Fiction, a method that situates speculative ideas in tangible, near-familiar contexts to provoke reflection and spark dialogue. This technique does not seek to predict the future but rather to open up a plurality of possibilities by destabilizing the default visions of technological progress or economic inevitability. Through vivid examples, such as *Abundance*, a speculative project imagining a regenerative urban culture in London, the essay demonstrates how speculative design can illuminate alternative pathways, exploring trade-offs and value systems that challenge the present.

At its heart, the essay celebrates the transformative power of narrative. The authors trace the influence of speculative fiction on real-world innovation, illustrating how the imaginative worlds of film, literature, and games inspire technological advancements and societal shifts. Yet they go further, insisting on the necessity of inclusivity in these imaginaries. For Bleecker and Revell, imagining the future is not a neutral act but one about asserting one's own desire, ambition, and authority to create one's own futures to inhabit. Such requires a deliberate, often challenging effort to center assert rather than consume futures narratives, discussions and representations against trad visions of progress, technology development, and centers of power and decision making.

Written with clarity and conviction,...

More than a biography, “Beatriz da Costa (un)disciplinary tactics” is a blueprint for how creative practices can reimagine technological development with empathy, exploration, and imagination. If you are interested in art, activism, and speculative design, this book will help you appreciate and learn from da Costa’s lasting influence and the transformative potential of art as a tool for public dialogue and social critique.

The essay challenges the conventional approach to futures thinking, arguing that certified foresight professionals, with their structured methodologies and trend analysis, miss the point of what it means to truly imagine alternative futures. Using examples like Gary Hustwit’s experimental filmmaking and Bill Bowerman’s creation of the jogging culture, the essay posits that the most impactful futures aren’t predicted; they are crafted by people asking unconventional questions and making tangible artifacts from speculative possibilities. True futurists, the essay asserts, disrupt conventional wisdom and shape new cultural paradigms—not through reports and frameworks, but by creating provocative artifacts that push us to question, engage, and rethink what the future could be.

Moving Beyond Fiction: A Practical Framework for Implementing Everyday Futures A framework and approach ford developing a futures-oriented sensibility within an organization with practical implementation outlines. This shares some practical strategies for integrating futures thinking into corporate strategy, policy development, product design, and more. By focusing on the everyday futures, everyday applications and their tangible outcomes, we can expect that organizations would move beyond superficial futurism to create meaningful paths forward. This is an everyday futures framework that includes basic tools for implementation, evaluation metrics, and continuous improvement mechanisms.

Much like architecture, design functions as a materialization of speculative ideas, creating tangible objects that provoke reflection on how the world might be re-imagined. Through this lens, design is akin to storytelling—especially as it engages with the same speculative possibilities that science fiction does, albeit through material props rather than narrative alone. Bleecker argues that design fiction occupies a space between fact and fiction, exploring new social rituals and proposing innovative, non-incremental futures.
Drawing parallels with the film Minority Report, I illustrate how technology prototypes—such as the gestural interface—play a role in shaping cultural understanding of future possibilities. These "diegetic prototypes" are embedded within the narrative of a film and become objects that blend reality with speculative elements. They circulate ideas to a broader audience, giving them cultural legibility and laying the groundwork for future technological innovations. The gesture interface, for instance, becomes a widely recognized concept that triggers further exploration and development in the real world, from the iPhone's touch gestures to motion tracking in gaming consoles.
Design Fiction is not about creating definitive predictions or claiming authority over the future but about creating a space for multiple futures to coexist—futures that provoke, question, and challenge our understanding of what is possible, offering a playful yet critically engaged view of the world. Through design fiction, the future is not a singular path but a web of possibilities that invite us to imagine, provoke, and, ultimately, to re-imagine.

'A Manifesto for Networked Objects': As More Smart, Mobile, Sensing “Things” Are Attached to the Internet, Their Presence and Participation and Agency (Ability To Create Action) Can Be Felt In Our Online Lives. A Keynote given in the city of Turin at the fourth edition of the Piemonte Share Festival from 11 to 16 March 2008.

A Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things," explores the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its implications for the interaction between humans and objects. ​ It introduces the term "Blogjects," which refers to objects that blog and participate in the social web, contributing to the exchange of ideas and information. ​ The document discusses how these networked objects, or Blogjects, can track their location, maintain histories of their encounters, and assert agency by influencing social discourse and actions. ​ The manifesto emphasizes the transformative potential of IoT, where objects become active participants in social networks, contributing to meaningful conversations and societal changes. ​ Examples include pigeons equipped with sensors to monitor pollution levels and Aibo robots that can blog their observations. ​ The document argues that the IoT should be leveraged to create more habitable worlds by enabling objects to provide insights and perspectives on environmental, social, and political issues. ​ The manifesto calls for a shift in how we design and interact with networked objects, moving beyond mere connectivity to fostering deeper engagements that can lead to positive changes in the physical and social world. ​