The document describes a workshop that aims to teach participants how to design speculative lifeworlds instead of just artifacts. The workshop introduces techniques to envision fictional worlds where speculative artifacts could exist and function by defining the necessary social, economic, political and technological conditions. Participants will first build the characteristics of an imagined world and then write short stories set in that world. The goal is to provide a more systemic approach to speculative design that focuses on designing the broader contexts around fictional objects, not just the objects themselves.

1. Giovanni Caruso - Angelica Fontana - Silvio Cioni | February 3rd, 2021
Forget Artefacts.
Design Speculative Lifeworlds Instead!

2. Meet the team
Giovanni Caruso
Angelica Fontana
Silvio Cioni
Interaction designer, Accenture AI
Co-founder, Speculative Futures Milan
@nrgiga
Service Designer, Lead Designer, Sketchin
Visiting Lecturer, Naba & Domus Academy
@angefontana
Executive Design Director, Sketchin
Adjunct Professor, Naba & Domus Academy
Advisor Master in Service Design, Domus Academy
Co-organizer Speculative Futures Milan
@cioni

3. why we are here today

4. The idea
aka what we want to get our hands on today
The workshop aims to experiment some design techniques to envision a
speculative world starting from a chosen
fi
ctional artefact.
The imagined must be de
fi
ned enough to allow the speculative artefact itself
(and many others) to exist and function.
The proposed design techniques want to help practitioners and researchers to
go beyond the design of immediate moments of use and consider
the social and technical systems required to keep these artefacts working.

5. Design Futures
futures-oriented practices and speculative perspectives
In the last years, we have witnessed to the spreading of speculative
and futures-oriented practices at the convergence of Design and
Futures Studies (mainly Speculative Design, Design Fiction and
Experiential Futures) that can help practitioners to widen their design
perspectives, and extend their toolbox for designing alternative
futures beyond user-centered approach.
The use of design and futures methods to develop a systemic
exploration of alternative futures is an area of investigation which
enables conversation about the paradigm shift required in the context
of values, ethics and social practices.
The Futures Cone
credits_ zenitdesign.de

6. Design Fiction
artefacts and narratives from the future
Julian Bleecker
Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction
2009
"A design
fi
ction practice creates these
conversation pieces, with the conversations
being stories about the kinds of experiences
and social rituals that might surround the
designed object.
Design
fi
ction objects are totems through
which a larger story can be told, or imagined
or expressed. They are like artifacts from
someplace else, telling stories about other
worlds."
credits_ julianbleecker.com

7. Addicted products: The story of Brad the Toaster, Simone Rebaudengo, 2012
A toaster that can only be rent and autonomously
decide to move to another host

8. Great! so what? What’s next?
forgetting artefacts… for a while
Meydan Levy
it is common to see
fi
ctional objects retaining all
the focus of the critical analysis while leaving less
to no space to further investigate the qualities
(such as values, social conditions and infrastructures)
that are crucial to the existence of the artefacts
themselves.

9. Wait! life-what?
introducing speculative lifeworlds
More recently a new approach has been introduced to underline how
Speculative Design and Design Fiction can be used to more explicitly
focus on and design the broader social, technical, environmental and
political worlds in which speculative artefacts exist.
This approach uses the concept of lifeworld of speculative artefacts to
go beyond immediate mundane situations of use, to help
practitioners to de
fi
ne the conditions for existence of a
fi
ctional artefact
and identify of the systemic implications that are intrinsic to the
imagined world.
In the work of speculative
design, we consider how the
lifeworlds of the future are
projected through an
imagined design. A projected
lifeworld can be thought of as
the lifeworld one would have
to inhabit in order for the
design to make sense.
Richmond Wong et al.

10. By exploring speculative Design and Design Fiction practices and moving from
the centricity of the artefact to adopt the lenses of speculative lifeworlds,
participants will learn to stretch their thinking and experiment a new approach
to focus on values, social conditions and technical systems supporting
speculative imaginaries.
experimenting a new approach

11. what we do today

12. Agenda
I'm late, I'm late! For a very important date!
5 min Welcome
15 min Introduction & Workshop objective
10 min Warm up & Team building
40 min Exercise 1 - Imagined world
40 min Exercise 2 - Stories from elsewhere
30 min Listen to stories from other worlds
10 min Feedback & Closing

13. Discover your speculative artefact

14. Teacher of Algorithms, Simone Rebaudengo, 2015
A new job for people training smart devices as if
they were pets. A teacher of algorithms can be
hired to teach smart objects being better devices
by learning owners’ habits

15. Camera Restricta, Philipp Schmitt, 2016
A disobedient tool for taking photographs.
It locates itself via GPS and searches online for photos
geotagged nearby. If the camera decides that too
many photos have been taken at your location, it
retracts the shutter and prevent you from shooting

16. Uninvited Guests, Super
fl
ux, 2016
A set of connected smart objects replacing human care givers.
These devices take care of elderly at home with a sort of
one-size-
fi
ts-all approach that may not work for everyone
and is sometimes hacked

17. Based on the selected artefact,
2 different design exercises are proposed

18. Imagined world
40 min.
credits_ Brian McGowan on Unsplash

19. Imagined world
build conditions for existence
Identify key characteristics of the world
Individually start mapping the key characteristics of the world the artefact inhabits in relation
to for different areas: Economic, Political, Social and Technological.
Focus on all the conditions for existence that must be true in order for the object to exist.
Build a common world
Then individually read all the characteristics identi
fi
ed in the previous exercise, for each area
vote one characteristic written by a group member that you evaluate to be coherent with
your own ones.
In group, collect the most voted characteristics and cluster similar ones.

20. Stories from elsewhere
40 min.
credits_ Dispatches From Elsewhere via menshealth.com

21. Stories from elsewhere
build everyday narratives
Set up your story elements
Pick 3 characteristics of the world from minimum two different areas mapped in the
previous and 1 activity from the provided list. Based on the elements you picked, build a
narrative to evoke the world your team have imagined.
Build your story
Write a short story, using the
fi
rst person, that describes how your day life might look
like in the imagined world focusing on the actions you carry out in relation to the selected
activity and on the interactions you might have during the day.
Connect stories
Individually read the stories written by your group mates and vote the two stories that are
coherent the most with yours.

22. Key takeaways

23. Takeaways
aka three things to bring home
The workshop provides an hands-on experience of a speculative design approach that moves the
focus of design from artefacts to lifeworlds.
The workshop aims at providing you with three principal takeaways:
Design techniques
to envision new values and
meanings for speculative
artefacts and lifeworlds
A systemic approach
to design for imagined
worlds
A novel perspective
on how speculative design and
design
fi
ction can be expanded to
design imagined worlds where
speculative artefacts might exist
and function
3
1 2

24. Forget Artefacts.
Design Speculative Lifeworlds Instead!
Thank you