The future doesn't exist yet. That's exactly why it's worth designing.

Speculative Design is the design of future products and services to understand the impact and implications of emerging technology and social or cultural trends. Rather than solving an immediate problem, it uses design to ask new kinds of questions — exploring possible futures so we can understand our present anew and make better decisions today.

It is closely related to critical design, design fiction, and design futures, with these variations emerging from the focus and intent of the designer. By disconnecting design from the immediate needs of the market, it lets organizations create new kinds of value: de-risking future possibilities, building empathy for future customers, citizens, and employees, and surfacing fresh context for strategy.

Speculative design works across research, strategy, product, service, and system contexts, in both tech and non-tech industries. By “closing the loop” — returning from an explored future to the present — it reveals product, investment, and research opportunities available to us now.

Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, and how meaning is made and communicated. It examines how images, words, objects, colours, and gestures carry cultural meaning — and how those meanings shift across contexts and change over time.

In design and cultural strategy, semiotics is a practical tool: it helps teams decode the codes of a category, understand what a brand or product is really signalling, and create communication that resonates with the culture it enters.

Critical Design uses design to question and challenge assumptions, values, and the role products play in everyday life — rather than simply making things more attractive or usable. Associated with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, it treats designed objects as provocations: prompts for debate about how we want to live.

It sits alongside speculative design as a way of using design to think and critique, opening up alternatives instead of optimising the status quo.

Both explore possible futures, but they differ in emphasis. Speculative design is the broader practice of designing future products, services, and scenarios to interrogate the implications of change. Design fiction is a narrower, narrative-driven technique within that space — using “diegetic prototypes” (props, artefacts, and stories that imply a whole world) to make a future feel tangible.

Put simply: design fiction is one storytelling method speculative designers use, while speculative design is the wider discipline it belongs to.

Futures thinking — also called design futures or strategic foresight — is the practice of systematically exploring how the future might unfold, mapping the trends, drivers, and uncertainties shaping it, and using design to make those possibilities concrete and actionable.

The goal isn’t to predict a single future but to prepare for many, so individuals and organizations can act with more foresight, resilience, and confidence today.

Cultural strategy is the practice of understanding cultural context — values, meanings, tensions, and emerging shifts — and using that insight to guide brand, product, and innovation decisions. It draws on ethnography, semiotics, and futures research to read where culture is heading.

For organizations, it turns “soft” cultural signals into concrete strategic direction: what to make, what to say, and how to stay relevant as meaning changes.

New Kind of Design (NKD) is a set of seven principles developed by the School of Critical Design that engage with the complexity and computational irreducibility of our current reality. It outlines the attributes critical for understanding and acting well in design and business contexts where outcomes cannot be simply forecast.

Explore the seven NKD principles →