Introduction

Design rhetoric is full of temporal assertions of ‘change’, ‘transformation’, ‘innovation’ (Maze, 2017), but these assertions point to not just to any possible future but specific and preferred futures. Futures that design helps bring into being. As such, design is deeply and intrinsically political, but for the largest part without reflecting on, or declaring, its implicit biases or intents (Fry, 2010; 2015). While speculative methods might sit easily with design methods – as design is already future directed and future making (Gunn et al, 2013; Yelavich, 2014) – design also has a knack of technicalising and commodifying methods at will (Hunt, 2011), with demands for positionality and foundational ethics often viewed with suspicion and judged as partisan (Fry, 2015; Tonkinwise, 2019). We propose that design education has a much larger role to play in the making and un- making of design practices and visions beyond dominant ontologies and to bring into being more ‘liveable’ social, political and environmental futures – ‘futures yet un- thought’ (Grosz, 1999).

The focus of the pedagogic research was a first semester project worked on with MA Design students over four years with four cohorts of students. The project was called ‘Design Futuring the City’ and had international cohorts of students from a cross- disciplinary design programme working on designing specific social and material futures for their home cities. Those futures were developed from a wide range of futurologist predictions; informed and supported by critical design theory and design anthropology and the UN sustainability goals. We discuss how findings suggest that speculative methods can encourage students to develop an understanding of how design simultaneously ‘futures’ and ‘de- futures’ (Fry, 2015). We reflect on, to what extent, it has made ethics and positionality visible to students and their sense of their potential material agency in future making as designers.

Speculation in design

Over the past decade speculation has become an increasingly potent tool for research, thinking and study across a wide range of disciplines such as sociology, politics, geography and design, among others (Moffat, 2019). In relation to design, Appadurai (2014: 9) points out that ‘Designers and design scholars have always understood that there is an obvious kinship between design, innovation, and newness and, thus, that design is a natural ally of futurity.’