# Teaching speculative design **Author:** Roy Bendor and Maria Luce Lupetti **Published:** 13 June 2024 (published in volume 35, 2025) **Length:** 38 mins (9,948 words) ## In Summary Roy Bendor and Maria Luce Lupetti examine how speculative design can be taught as a critical practice rather than a method for predicting or solving future problems. Drawing on a seven-week postgraduate course, they describe activities moving from contextual inquiry through experimentation to the staging of speculative artefacts. Students developed critical reflection on design's social and political consequences, while confronting uncertainty and the difficulty of communicating ambiguous futures. The authors argue for structured teaching that preserves imaginative freedom and critical enquiry. **Source:** [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10798-024-09908-3](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10798-024-09908-3) ## What might this mean for us? How might Higher Education make speculative enquiry a central part of learning about emerging technologies? Electric Dreams' object-led explorations and workshops offer ways to examine alternative futures without assuming technological change is inevitable. Could staged artefacts and collective discussion help students and staff articulate ethical positions, question disciplinary assumptions and retain space for uncertainty rather than immediate solutions? ## Links in this reading - [Speculative design: Crafting the speculation, James Auger](https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2013.767276) - [Speculative design as thought experiment, Barendregt and Vaage](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2021.06.001) - [What is critical about critical design?, Bardzell and Bardzell](https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466451) - [Value sensitive speculative design, Beach and Fox](https://doi.org/10.55612/s-5002-051-005)