As the world endures and approaches a string of energy crises, both financially and environmentally, this project aims to critique and challenge society's relationship with energy by provoking individuals to examine their current habits of energy consumption, consider the future implications of these actions, and question their willingness to make sacrifices for a cleaner environment. This is accomplished through the development of a fictional society in the near future in which individuals are required to produce all the electrical energy that they need or desire to consume. Within the daily narrative of a fictional family of five, the details and events of their everyday lives have been extrapolated to create a liminal world where mundane, yet peculiar diegetic prototypes create tense situations, uncomfortable behaviors, and unforeseen consequences. Plot devices manifested include distributed government information in the form of an energy harvesting catalog, product infomercial, energy bill, and a home monitoring brochure. The narrative emphasis and human driven context aspires to foster a new lens of speculation, imagination, and discovery regarding the production and consumption of energy. What if you were required to produce all the energy you desire to consume?

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Recipe for the Future is a toolkit for change-making through speculative design and food. It is a guide for a workshop to help participants imagine what the future of food could look like. It introduces the method of speculative cooking, where speculative objects and food-related future scans allow the imagination of a different world, a different future. This tool is used to allow minds to let go of the constraints of the present reality and see how else things could be. Question the social imaginaries and understand that it is not the only way we can live. As a future scenario is created, the engagement with the complexities of sustainability and climate change is unavoidable.

This is the report of a thesis project by a Design +Change bachelor student that strives to introduce a non-human perspective to children. With the hope of it staying and growing with them to be used in the future to improve our environments and ways of living to be more sustainable. This was done by developing and prototyping activities for a workshop. These activities were then tested with a kindergarten class and ended up being a basis for a toolkit. This toolkit will be used by teachers and pedagogues to introduce and explore a non-human perspective and how it could be used to improve our environments with children in kindergarten.

Yes / This Case Study paper presents the first exploration of Speculative Design as a participatory democracy method for navigating the future of ageing in Malaysia. Speculative Design in the context of Global South is emerging, but without much data on how it is applied within different socio-economic conditions from the Global North countries. This Case Study considers the challenges and opportunities of employing Speculative Design as policy identification and development method from the context of Malaysia, a Global South country with its own unique characteristics. The paper concludes by suggesting that the novelty of Speculative Design as a policy-design approach in Global South countries, such as in Malaysia, requires the right selection of provocations and culturally familiar content to ease introduction of the methodology. Also, the efficacy of this approach as a participatory design application would require further enculturation within targeted communities, as well as sustained engagement through Champions. / This work was supported by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number: AH/S005684/1].

This thesis, “Designing for Death in a Divided Future,” by Hillevi Hesseldahl, is a speculative design project which explores the ideological dichotomy in addressing climate crises within the Anthropocene epoch. The study highlights two major frameworks: Posthumanism together with Anthroposophy, advocating for a harmonious integration with nature, and Transhumanism together with Eco-Realism, emphasizing technological solutions and a geologial separation between human and wild ecosystems. The project uses speculative design to visualize future death rites, presenting two contrasting scenarios for Stockholm in 2050.  The first scenario, “Gaian Sympoiesis,” envisions a society deeply connected with nature, employing local, community-based solutions. Here, death rites involve the “Vessel of Return,” an urn designed to return human essence to the earth, symbolizing a cyclical view of life.  The second scenario, “Cybernetic Ascendancy,” portrays a technologically advanced society where humans withdraw from nature, relying on digital innovation and conservation of natural habitats. This scenario introduces the “Orb of Descendancy,” a digital artifact encapsulating a deceased person’s life data, reflecting a rational, data-driven approach to memorialization.  By examining these speculative futures, the thesis sheds light on current ideological divides and the potential impacts of our choices on the trajectory of human civilization. This project combines artistic methods, personal interviews, and design theories to create tangible representations of possible futures, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of the present and stimulate discourse on navigating the Anthropocene.

Our interactions with objects build cultural codes, reflecting lifestyles, values, and identities beyond functional expectations. With open connectivity in the contemporary consumer environments, we have access to homogenized material cultures not only for daily activities but also for ceremonies and rituals to mark important events, such as birth, marriage, and death. What will happen to our cultural codes and diverse traditions when various cultural norms meet, exchange, clash, hybridize, and evolve? In this research, globalized material cultures were investigated to discover metaphoric comparisons, to formulate conceptual frameworks, and to develop informed design, which can address evolving cultural conditions appropriately, in comparison with commercialized goods. Considering we often ritualize sequential stages of life course or challenging events, but rarely divorce, I explored the socio-cultural norms of marriage and divorce in the current social construct to anticipate globally evolving divorce phenomena. My thesis focused on relatively unknown material cultures in ritualizing divorce by combining speculative design with semiotic, hybrid, idiosyncratic approaches to communicate desirable future scenarios for the emerging multi-cultural context. This research aims to explore how artifacts and rituals can help people cope with transitional events and how design practices can provide meaningful and reflective material cultures.

Nuclear waste remains radioactive for thousands of years. Burying it underground in an enormous repository, called Onkalo, surrounded and secured by solid rock is the long-term solution Finnish authorities implement right now. Once the repository is filled up, it will be locked up forever and never opened again. At the same time three new nuclear power plants are built. Out of Sight, out of Mind? Ultimately, this raises questions: Can this be the solution for final disposal of nuclear waste? How do we understand a problem clearly exceeding our capabilities as human beings? How do we deal with the dilemmas of uncertainty, invisibility, time, demand, possible contamination, and our individual responsibility as human beings? Understanding Through Interaction I designed three everyday products, a lamp, a toy for children, and a pregnancy test, that afford a familiar everyday action on one hand, while exposing a dilemma related to Onkalo on the other. In doing so, the artifacts make those dilemma tangible and facilitate understanding and critical thinking. Sharing a personal experience, the users can engage in a personal discourse around nuclear waste actively, opposing the distant and highly politicalised discourse spread by the media.

The home is a physical place that provides isolation, comfort, access to essential needs on a daily basis, and it has a strong impact on a person’s life. Computational and media technologies (digital and electronic objects, devices, protocols, virtual spaces, telematics, interaction, social media, and cyberspace) become an important and vital part of the home ecology, although they have the ability to transform the domestic experience and the understanding of what a personal space is. For this reason, this work investigates the domestication of computational media technology; how objects, systems, and devices become part of the personal and intimate space of the inhabitants. To better understand the taming process, the home is studied and analysed from a range of perspectives (philosophy, sociology, architecture, art, and technology), and a methodological process is proposed for critically exploring the topic with the development of artworks, designs, and computational systems. The methodology of this research, which consists of five points (Context, Media Layers, Invisible Matter, Diffusion, and Symbiosis), suggests a procedure that is fundamental to the development and critical integration of the computationally enhanced home. Accordingly, the home is observed as an ecological system that contains numerous properties (organic, inorganic, hybrid, virtual, augmented), and is viewed on a range of scales (micro, meso and macro). To identify the “choreographies” that are formed between these properties and scales, case studies have been developed to suggest, provoke, and speculate concepts, ideas, and alternative realities of the home. Part of the speculation proposes the concept of DomoNovus (the “New Home”), where technological ubiquity supports the inhabitants’ awareness, perception, and imagination. DomoNovus intends to challenge our understanding of the domestic environment, and demonstrates a range of possibilities, threats, and limitations in relation to the future of home. This thesis, thus, presents methods, experiments, and speculations that intend to inform and inspire, as well as define creative and imaginative dimensions of the computationally-enhanced home, suggesting directions for the further understanding of the domestic life.

What impact do social media have on mental well-being and how can design become a tool for increasing awareness among users? To interact on social media means to find new ways of seeking a sense of belonging, of being part of a society that can validate our existence and attribute value to what we decide to share. But what happens when there is a gap separating the ways in which we create value and sense of selfworth online and offline? How does it impact our mental well-being and the capacity to become a productive element of our society? Like Me is a speculative design project that explores the gap between the virtual and the real, while researching how it impacts our mental well-being and sense of self-worth in society. This Bachelor’s thesis delves into this topic through design methods and visual communication, resulting in a short fictional film about a speculative scenario. The aim of this research is to raise a discussion about embracing what is to come, finding a new sense of awareness to improve our impact on social sustainability. KEYWORD