“[Speculative Design is] an activity where conjecture is as good as knowledge, where futuristic and alternative scenarios convey ideas, and where the goal is to emphasize implications of “mindless” decisions for mankind.”

As a strategic tool, Speculative Design operates adjacent to and complementary with conventional roadmap-based ideation. Where roadmaps typically chart a linear progression from current capabilities to near-term goals, Speculative Design introduces a counterfactual dimension. It opens a space for ideas that might otherwise be excluded by feasibility filters or constrained by incrementalism.

Speculative Design helps teams identify and challenge foundational assumptions baked into a product roadmap, strategic direction, or market forecast. By prototyping speculative artifacts (like imagined interfaces, services, or cultural objects), it makes hidden beliefs visible and negotiable.

Rather than merely forecasting, Speculative Design materializes possible futures in the form of tangible prototypes — not to predict but to explore. These might include artifacts from a future scenario (e.g., a product manual, a civic regulation, a user complaint form), enabling stakeholders to experience the implications of an idea before it's pursued.

Traditional strategy often shies away from ideas deemed “too far out.” Speculative Design creates a sandbox for those ideas — a low-risk environment to ask “what if?” without committing to a productization pipeline. It enables organizations to stretch the edges of plausibility and identify long-horizon signals worth tracking or acting on early.

In this way, Speculative Design serves as a bridge between the present and the future, allowing teams to explore the implications of their choices in a tangible way. It has utility in a variety of contexts including in policy, product design, strategic foresight, and particularly in more typically artistic contexts where it can be used to provoke critical conversations about the future of technology and society.

Policy makers can use speculative artifacts to open up conversations by simulating the large scale ramifications of policy, regulations, and governance structures before they’re enacted.

Product teams can use them to test user perceptions of not-yet-possible concepts, even far-out ones that allow teams to imagine unexpected and exploratory futures.

Executives can use speculative scenarios to provoke strategic conversation and alignment on long-term vision.

It's important to emphasize that Speculative Design is a way to prototype not just products but worldviews. It's not about use-cases in the narrow product design sense. When you practice speculative design you're prototyping worlds — or worldbuilding by implication of what the prototype implies about the world. Speculative Design provides the scaffolding for imagining adjacent possibilities, opening up paths that traditional design thinking and strategy might overlook — not because they’re impossible, but because they lie just outside the sanctioned map.