Composing with AI

Speculative Design as a Future-Oriented Tool

I suggest speculative design as a method uniquely equipped to help compositionists and other communicators respond to the challenges of emergent AI technologies. Speculative design is a practice that focuses on exploring and illustrating potential futures rather than designing for immediate practical needs. Speculative design stimulates thought, discussion, and critical reflection about potential societal, cultural, ethical, and environmental futures. It challenges existing assumptions and conventions about the role that products or services play in our lives, fostering new ideas about possible alternatives (Hoffman, 2022; Wilkie et al., 2017; Dunne & Raby, 2013). Speculations may center around hopeful possibilities or dystopian consequences resulting from present choices (Jagoda, 2023). Speculation grows from "a sensibility concerned with resisting a future that presents itself as probable or plausible," and contends that "no matter how pervasive the impasse may be, [the probable future] can never exhaust the unrealized potential of the present" (Wilkie et al., 2017, p. 7).

Practicing speculative design often involves crafting scenarios, stories, technological prototypes, or artifacts—like the "photos" of future streets and cities I generated in my non-profit work. These creations help demonstrate potential futures, making them more material for public audiences. Essentially, speculative design encourages us to think critically about what could be. It is closely related to critical design, a term coined by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013), authors of the text Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Both critical design and speculative design use critical, maker-style methods to challenge the status quo and encourage people to consider their relationship with the designed world (Faris & Holmes, 2022).

Speculative design offers several benefits that make it a valuable approach in both academic and practitioner contexts. First, it fosters creative thinking by encouraging communicators (designers) and researchers to step outside conventional boundaries and explore alternative futures. This imaginative exercise can lead to innovative solutions that might not be discovered through traditional design methods. Speculative design often evokes what Johnson & Johnson (2020) refer to as "ambient imaginaries," the sensory details that "focus the attention of publics deciding which parts of the material environment to carry into the future" (p. 15). These sensory-based approaches help audiences form affective connections with an unlived future. Second, speculative design serves as a tool for social critique, allowing us to question existing systems and norms by presenting alternative scenarios. This can spark meaningful discussions about societal values, ethics, and directions for future development. The artifacts created by speculative design are not end products; instead, they are a means for facilitating the kind of participatory public processes that result in the usable, citizen-created data discussed by Moore and Elliott (2016).

Third, speculative design enhances interdisciplinary collaboration by integrating insights from fields such as technology, social sciences, and the humanities, potentially creating a richer, more nuanced expression of human intent. At its best, it invites broader participation in the design field rather than reinforcing disciplinary boundaries. Finally, speculative design acts as a catalyst for public engagement. By presenting provocative or visionary scenarios, this method invites the broader community to participate in shaping their own futures, a move towards democratizing the design process. Research suggests that when communities work together to imagine new futures, they develop social resilience—a necessary element of navigating challenge and change (Hoffman, 2022, p. 5).

While AI is entrenched in the meanings of the past, speculative design asks us to put our intentionality into projecting possible futures with the hope that doing so will serve as a method of reflecting on and rectifying present action. This chapter does not propose that all AI-generated projects should be speculative in nature. Rather, I am suggesting that human users may be able to mitigate the sociocultural consequences of generative AI by acquiring and implementing the critical skills that emerge from engaging with speculative design practices.