Speculative design explores possible futures and questions the assumptions behind the present. Rather than asking only how to solve an existing problem, it often starts with “what if?”

Possible futures can be brought to life through design in the form of imagined objects, services, and environments which tell the story of possible worlds that do not yet exist. By making that future tangible, designers can examine the systems, values, and behaviours that would need to exist around it.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are foundational to this approach. Their work frames the future not as one fixed destination, but as a range of probable, plausible, possible and preferable futures. The purpose is not necessarily to predict what will happen, but to create alternatives that help us question what is happening now.

Speculative design is especially useful for designers working in climate, as climate change operates across long timescales and complex systems that are difficult to imagine. By giving the future a form it can not only inspire, but influence, what kinds of worlds are possible.

Getting Started

• Speculative design: A comprehensive field guide (article) – Excellent guide by James Roha. For a single read to familiarize yourself with speculative design, this is the one.
• Cultural, Visual, and Futures Literacies: Educating the Next Generation of Designers (video) – A behind-the-scenes look at the course, Design Research for Speculation, where students learn to transform rigorous research into compelling visions of the future.
• Speculate on Futures from Sitra (exercise) – Take an emerging signal and ask what could happen if it became mainstream.
• Mitigation of Shock by Superflux (case study) – An immersive London apartment imagining daily life in 2050 under climate-driven food and infrastructure disruption.
• Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (book) – The foundational text for speculative and critical design.

Learn More

Questions to Ask

Before creating a speculative climate future, it can help to ask:

• Whose future are we imagining?
• Is this a preferable future, and preferable to whom?
• Who benefits, and who carries the risk?
• Are we designing adaptation to an unjust system, or questioning the system itself?
• What has become normal in this world?
• What systems had to continue for this future to emerge?