Present/Future Objects: Critical Making & Speculative Design
Critical making practices often involve engaging with tangible objects to generate new knowledge, or what Matt Ratto calls “thinking with your hands.” This paper explores the pedagogical goals and outcomes for an assignment created for a graduate course in speculative design called “present/future objects.” In this assignment, students are asked to take an everyday object, break it apart, and rebuild it into an imagined future object. The goal is not to build a better or futuristic version of the object they broke apart but rather to imagine something entirely new with the pieces they have. This assignment engages students in both critical and creative practice, while also challenging them to think about the physical affordances and material effects of the individual parts in their creation, as well as the way these pieces support the development of a whole new design concept. In speculative design, tangible, physical objects are often the most evocative way to demonstrate something about a future world because they offer concrete representations that generate new forms of knowledge about possible future worlds. This project helps HCI and interaction design students to move away from digital space, screens, and designing web experiences, and toward working and thinking with their hands, making playful tangible objects, and grappling with the possibilities and limitations of the materials they choose to work with and how they might represent different futures.
This project was presented and published in EduCHI 2024, ACM.
Student Project: THe Intelliband
This design imagines a future world where AI has had a negative effect on people—influencing their cognitive abilities, memory, attention span, and their overall health and wellbeing. The Intelliband offers personalized experiences that help people push back against this decline with biofeedback, memory retention, and emotional regulation. The present-day object for this project was a metal strainer that could be pulled apart into individual metal pieces. The student imagined the way this device would fit on a user’s head, as well as the various functional elements that connect into a user’s brain. The design is elegant and effective, and its possible use becomes clear when it is demonstrated as a device that slides on the head as easily as a headband.
student project: Klor
Klor: Hassle-Free Nutrition engages with current food trends like Soylent and Huel, pushing nutrition towards effortless, emotionless engagement with nutrients. This design imagines photosynthesis as a way of providing nutrition, in a future where our bodies can exist off energy created through this device and a bit of sunshine. The original object was a portable charger pack, which easily fits the role of a solar-paneled personal nutrition device. This object wasn’t overly broken apart and maintains a similar form, however, the presentation and framing give it a new function. This is a concept that utilizes storytelling, branding, and overall presentation to great effect in terms of making the object come alive.
student project: Transtemporal Travel Binoculars
The present object, a coffee grinder, is transformed into a binocular-like device that allows a user to see the world from any moment in time. The device plays with reality by suggesting that we can “create small wormholes in the barrels of the binoculars” in order to seamlessly move from place to place. One of the especially playful elements of this piece is the movement of the grinding arm, which spins round and round as one holds the binoculars up. Many students commented on the “steampunk” nature of this design. This student used Midjourney as a useful point of conversation in class when thinking about the challenges that AI presents to design concepting, creativity, and materiality.
Student design projects, such as the Eternal Battery, help students to imagine alternative futures and more sustainable ways of living.