Artifacts of the Future. Exploring Imagined Futures with Speculative Design Objects

In a time of rapid technological, social, and environmental change, speculative design offers manifold possibilities and public arena for exploring and interrogating futures. By creating artifacts, scenarios, and narratives that challenge conventional assumptions, speculative design opens up non-linguistic forms of critical reflection on emerging technologies and societal shifts. On the basis of visual analysis, the presentation investigates speculative design as a form of data that provides insights into the social, cultural, and ethical, dimensions of imagined futures. Analyzing design objects on the basis of visual methods, not only imagined futures are explored but also the embedding of these imaginations in contemporary knowledge forms. The data corpus for the visual analysis is made up of design objects and documents on design techniques that are created from October 2024 until June 2025 in a joint project with designers and the Grassi Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig (Germany), funded by the Fraunhofer Network for Science, Art and Design. The research project aims to use speculative design to harness the transformative potential of residues and waste from agricultural production in the development and application of new materials. The designer Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne argue that “design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality” (Raby and Dunne 2013). As part of the data analysis, we focus on the problem that design speculations not only imagine futures developments, but also selectively open up ways to realize these futures by drawing on specific knowledge forms while neglecting others. Based on the results of the visual analysis of the design objects, we will explore in what way speculative design objects, embedded in professional discourses and forms of knowledge, can form a space for redefining future realities, i.e. a heterotopia (Foucault 2005).