Speculative Design & Fictions

• Speculative Design and Fictions is a methodological practice that uses narrative and artifact construction to interrogate sociotechnical systems and propose alternative futures.
• It employs tangible prototypes, performative rituals, and critical world-building to reveal hidden value tensions and encourage reflective stakeholder dialogue.
• Participatory approaches integrate creative exploration and emerging technologies, fostering inclusive co-creation and actionable insights for policy and design innovation.

Speculative design and fictions constitute a rigorously theorized and creatively enacted set of methodologies that use artifact and narrative construction to interrogate, prototype, and reimagine sociotechnical systems, values, and futures. Rather than optimizing for immediate practical solutions, these approaches deliberately cultivate alternative imaginaries through tangible scenarios, performative rituals, and provocative world-building. They function as both critique and exploration—seeking to defamiliarize everyday technologies, surface hidden structures, and engage stakeholders in reflection and debate about possible, preferable, or unsettling futures. Fictions serve not merely as illustrative supplements to design, but as critical frameworks and scaffolding for collective knowledge generation (Seymour et al., 2020, Hu, 25 Feb 2026, Bates et al., 25 Jul 2025, Horn et al., 2023). The following sections systematically delineate the definitions, frameworks, methodologies, epistemic considerations, concrete applications, and contemporary evaluation strategies that structure advanced work in speculative design and fictions.

1. Core Definitions and Conceptual Frameworks

Speculative design is characterized as a methodological practice to “decontextualise the familiar and imagine alternatives,” foregrounding the latent assumptions embedded within current technologies by creating artifacts or worlds that “make invisible social and technical practices tangibly visible” (Seymour et al., 2020). The orientation is resolutely non-predictive, distinguishing speculative design from forecasting or scenario planning by its willingness to entertain provocative, even implausible, futures as analytic devices rather than projections (Wessel et al., 27 Jan 2026, Toussaint et al., 2021).

Design fiction is defined as the use of narrative and product prototypes to “exaggerate elements of a design or isolate them from their original context,” allowing both reevaluation and reinterpretation through the creation of imaginary worlds that sustain a particular critical frame (Seymour et al., 2020). The method extends beyond single artifacts—encompassing texts, images, objects, installations, and performative events—to construct “diegetic prototypes,” boundary objects, or experiential vignettes that make future socio-technical arrangements accessible for critique, co-construction, and negotiation (Bates et al., 25 Jul 2025, Dörrenbächer et al., 2021, Wang et al., 7 Oct 2025).

Central to both practices is the use of “what if?” scenarios, drawing heavily on critical theory (Dunne & Raby), post-phenomenology, and sometimes non-Western cosmologies (e.g., Shinto animism, kami) to pluralize categories for agency, presence, and value (Seymour et al., 2020, Axelsson, 1 Sep 2025). Fictions are positioned not merely as representations or predictions but as functional probes into the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of design space.

2. Narrative World-Building, Ritual, and Materiality

Speculative design and fiction leverage world-building as the principal mechanism for surfacing implicit norms, ideological logics, and value tensions. This process deliberately draws attention not only to speculative technologies but to the socio-material practices that surround them. Rituals—such as the “offering” of data to voice assistants conceived as kami-hosts (Seymour et al., 2020), or multisensory, embodied performances like the “dinner-in-the-drama” featuring biohybrid food (Wang et al., 7 Oct 2025)—become loci for interrogating agency, reciprocity, and trust.

Materiality is foregrounded in the design of speculative artifacts, whether tangible (3D-printed prototypes, cards, props) or digital (generative AI visuals, immersive asset packs) (Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025, Epstein et al., 2022). The playful exaggeration and ritualization of everyday interactions engender processes of phenomenological defamiliarization, exposing the “gulf of interpretation” and moving from flat GUIs to “spirits” or systems that modulate social/technical harmony (Seymour et al., 2020). Material artifacts, when situated in performative or participatory workshops, serve as epistemic anchors, scaffolding discursive and reflective engagement among diverse stakeholders (Toussaint et al., 2021, Wessel et al., 27 Jan 2026).

3. Participatory and Collaborative Methodologies

Across the literature, participatory co-creation is central to the operationalization of speculative design fictions. Techniques include Future Workshop methods—structured in Critique, Fantasy, and Implementation phases (Toussaint et al., 2021)—collaborative generation of textual/visual prompts (Epstein et al., 2022), hybrid physical-digital prototyping (Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025), and role-based enactment of utopian/dystopian societies (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021).

Workshops are structured to maximize inclusivity, lowering barriers for non-experts, and refocusing authority from designer-authors to communal, democratized authorship (Wu et al., 2022, Dörrenbächer et al., 2021). Narrative vignettes or persona-driven scenarios are iteratively refined through collective processes that move cyclically between fiction-writing and the abstraction of core design principles (Toussaint et al., 2021). The methodology often employs “bridging artifacts” (e.g., Data Daemons) to translate abstract ethical or technical issues into discussion-ready, relatable metaphors (Toussaint et al., 2021).

Technologically, participatory design fictions integrate generative AI as co-creative partners, intentionally leveraging the tool’s surprise, variance, and unpredictability—framing model misalignments or quirks as productive “happy accidents” that catalyze lateral and implementation-focused ideation (Epstein et al., 2022, Wu et al., 2022).

4. Epistemic Evaluation: From Surprise to Structured Insight

Recent work has developed information-theoretic models for evaluating the epistemic yield of speculative fictions. The concept of epiplexity—epistemic complexity—is introduced as a formal measure of the learnable, structured information $S_t(X)$ that an observer can extract from a speculative artifact, given a finite cognitive budget $t$. The residual, non-compressible complexity is $H_t(X)$ (entropic noise). Total description length decomposes as

$L_t(X) = S_t(X) + H_t(X)$

(Hu, 25 Feb 2026).

Provotypes (provocative prototypes) are assessed not by their ability to shock but by their capacity to encode and transmit structured, transferable insights—second-order effects, value tensions, governance frames—beyond surface-level surprise. High-epiplexity fictions maximize $S_t(X)$ while calibrating $H_t(X)$ to avoid aestheticized noise that fails to update observer models. Practical frameworks (audit checklists, Quadrant maps) are provided to guide iteration and review of fictions, with explicit consideration of observable, transferable conceptual models versus intractable or merely affective outputs (Hu, 25 Feb 2026, Kiskola et al., 26 Mar 2025).

5. Domains of Application: Case Studies and Design Fictions in Practice

Speculative design fictions are operationalized across multiple technological, social, and institutional domains:

• Human–AI Interaction: Shinto-inspired fictions recast voice assistants as kami, foregrounding ritual, reciprocity, trust, and the duelity of “harmonious” versus “wild” system behaviors (Seymour et al., 2020). Design fictions prototype mutual theories of mind in AI–human teams, formalizing user/agent alignment via latent model distance measures (Weisz et al., 2024).
• Ethical Data Management: Personified Data Daemons serve as negotiation agents, facilitating participant discussion of privacy, value adaptation, and agency in participatory workshops (Toussaint et al., 2021).
• Energy and Sustainability: Fictional consultancies and diegetic dashboards imagine post-neoliberal regimes in energy management, using world-building to shift KPIs from efficiency to comfort, context, and human/non-human centricity (Bates et al., 25 Jul 2025).
• Media and Synthetic Logistics: ChatFOS, a speculative GPT-driven logistics design business, operationalizes LLMs as “synthetic media routers” and collapses the boundary between workflow fiction and enterprise prototyping (Horn et al., 2023).
• Cultural Heritage and Museums: Asset pack–based virtual museums allow citizen curators to build hybrid spaces that interweave digital twins, intangible heritage, and interactive experiences (Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025).
• Robotic Equity and Social Identity: Queer robotics fictions articulate intervention domains for in-group celebration, out-group familiarization, and resilient resource networks—arguing for participatory, authenticity-focused robot design (Axelsson, 1 Sep 2025).
• Positive Utopianism: Participatory enactment and evaluation of utopian fictions (e.g., resource-sharing “Hyperpipe” systems) address critique of dystopian bias, contextlessness, and authorship elitism in traditional design fiction (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021).

6. Guidelines, Evaluation, and Methodological Challenges

Speculative design and fiction demand tailored evaluation strategies. Instead of traditional quantitative metrics, approaches include in-fiction ethnography, narrative reflection from within the scenario, and assessment of emotional, social, and governance interdependencies (Dörrenbächer et al., 2021, Toussaint et al., 2021). Audit frameworks, such as the epiplexity checklist, prompt designers to inventory the second-order effects, governance implications, and cross-contextual invariants their fictions surface (Hu, 25 Feb 2026).

Participatory and co-creation processes require scaffolding for bridging abstraction, ensuring inclusivity, and iteratively translating narrative artifacts into actionable design principles or policy guides (Toussaint et al., 2021, Wu et al., 2022). There are recommendations to embed “positive friction” into tool workflows to slow interactions and stress critical thinking (Wessel et al., 27 Jan 2026).

Methodological rigor is advanced by tightly coupling narrative elements to empirically grounded community themes, as seen in fictions seeded by qualitative analysis of expert concerns (e.g., the “Competence Crisis” for AI-assisted research) (Wessel et al., 27 Jan 2026) and by explicitly tracing all plot elements to observed real-world anxieties or aspirations.

7. Integration with Broader Design, Social, and Policy Discourses

Speculative design and design fictions now actively shape interdisciplinary research in HCI, STS, heritage, policy, education, and emerging AI governance. They are used to pre-figure alternative material realities, destabilize entrenched neoliberal or technical paradigms, and introduce complexity into planning and debate (Bates et al., 25 Jul 2025, Hu, 25 Feb 2026). The approach is increasingly advocated as a means to democratize technological futures, foster value-sensitive design, and inform policy through high-epiplexity, participatory, and context-rich scenarios (Toussaint et al., 2021, Rhodes et al., 7 Oct 2025, Kiskola et al., 26 Mar 2025).

Design fictions are recognized as actionable boundary objects—enabling interdisciplinary workshop collaboration, empirical reflection on technology’s world-building capacity, and the embedding of deep governance, accountability, and agency issues. By re-imagining not only what is possible but how collective futures are constructed, assessed, and revised, speculative design and fictions have become central to both critical practice and technical innovation.