Looking forward, glancing back — A reflection in design futures
By: Ritika Periwal
Tags: Futurism, Service Design, London, Design Research, Speculative Design

© Stephanie Wunderlich

In March 2019, the council in the Southwark borough of London declared a climate emergency and pledged to make the borough carbon neutral by 2030. As a part of the Design Futures unit in my MA Service Design programme at University of the Arts London, we were asked to speculate and generate ideas for what the future may look like for the borough in the travel & transport sector.

This unit is about speculative design and uses ‘research through design’ methodology to create conversations through provocations in the form of diegetic objects. All this sounded pretty alien to me at the start, however, I was excited to learn a new way to conduct design research. It’s not often that one gets to experiment with new ways of working in commercial design practice and is told it’s okay to have the wrong answers. So with that in mind, I started this 7 week long journey, ready to meddle with the future.

The methodology

Speculative design starts with asking ‘what if’ and relies on a designer’s informed imagination to address ‘wicked problems’ in the society. I say ‘informed’ because contrary to my belief at the start of the unit, speculative thinking is not about dreaming up fantastical, over the top narrative as much it is about critical look into the behaviours of today. Speculative design is also not about predicting the future, but rather using design to combat future challenges and head into a preferable future.

In this unit, we used research through design methodology to instigate public debate. Research through design methodology uses lab, field and showroom frameworks as means of conducting research. In the past, our research activities have been limited to conducting field research. However, in this unit, we also use the ‘showroom’ framework to collaborate with potential stakeholders. In their book ‘Design research through practice from the lab, field and showroom’, the authors claim, the ‘showroom’ framework uses prototypes to provoke reactions and conversation with the ultimate goal of making a positive difference in the world we live in (Koskinen et al., 2011, pp. 9)

I found this way of conducting research valuable, as it encourages designers to learn by doing rather than by analysis. Doing this helped clarify our own understanding of the future rather than getting stuck with the details. From the perspective of a service designer, it’s a great way to engage and collaborate with people, confront our own biases and have the ability to look beyond them in the service of the people.

At the start…

Armed with this new knowledge, a group of 4 Service Design Students (Freddie, Giselle, Sayali and myself) set out to create a future world situated in Southwark 2030.

As I said before, speculative design is about ‘informed imagination’, so our first step was to inform ourselves through a thorough scan of the existing horizon. With focus on travel and transport, we looked at innovation and policies both from a local and international context. This framework helped looking at travel and transport holistically and identify interdependencies of the sectors. We further broke down our findings into 6 major buckets — Economic, Political, Environmental, Social, Technological and Behavioural.