Speculative design is one practice used by many professions. A service designer, a product manager, a policymaker and an engineer can all run the same workflow — signals, a future wheel, scenarios, a specific future artefact, its implications, then backcasting to a decision — but each starts from a different horizon, already owns a different toolkit, and is trying to change a different decision. These guides take one role at a time and show where the practice fits the job you already do.
Before the guides, it is worth being clear about what does not change between them, and what does.
What stays the same in every role
The method is shared. Every guide in this series assumes the workflow we describe in the speculative design methodology, and none of them re-explains it. If you are new to the practice, read what speculative design is first.
Four commitments hold whoever is doing the work.
The horizon is further out than you are used to. Most organisations plan on a two-year cycle; the useful zone for this work is beyond ten years and short of twenty-five, for reasons we set out in our essay on time horizons. Inside two years, the future is the roadmap.
The evidence is specific. Signals are named, dated, verifiable events, not opinions about where things are heading. The distinction is in signals, trends and megatrends.
The future is made concrete. A scenario becomes a named product, a document, an object or a service, specific enough that people can disagree with it. Abstraction is the most common way this work fails, and it never feels like failure while it is happening.
The loop closes. The work ends with a changed decision in the present, worked back through backcasting — not with an exhibition.
What changes from role to role
Three things change, and they are why a separate guide for each discipline is useful rather than repetitive.
The horizon problem you start from. A product manager is held to the quarter. An architect designs buildings that outlast every plan in the methodology but are briefed for present-day use. A foresight practitioner already works in decades, but on paper. Each role has its own way of being trapped in the present, and the way out is different.
The artefact you make. The method asks you to build the future to the fidelity the argument needs. A UX designer can make a working interface from 2037 in a week; an industrial designer makes an object; a graphic designer makes the label, the notice or the front page that makes a future feel ordinary; a strategist may never make anything but a document, and should still make it specific. Your existing craft is the cheapest route to fidelity.
The decision you hand back. The work only pays when it lands in the vocabulary of the people who decide. For a product team that is the roadmap; for a strategist, where to play and how to win; for an engineer, a design constraint; for a policymaker, which regulatory change to start arguing for. Each guide ends its worked example at that decision.
| Role | The horizon you usually work to | What speculative design gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Service designers | Current-state journeys and near-term improvements | A blueprint of a future service, backstage included |
| UX and product designers | The next release | Prototypes that provoke rather than validate |
| Industrial designers | A product cycle of a few years | The object as an argument about the future |
| Graphic designers | The campaign or the identity refresh | Everyday ephemera that make a future believable |
| Architects and urban designers | Today's use, for buildings that last generations | Renders that show the uncomfortable futures of a place |
| Product managers | The quarter | A vision beyond the roadmap, and its assumptions exposed |
| Strategists | The three-to-five-year plan | Scenarios specific enough to argue with |
| Innovation teams | Horizon 3 in theory, Horizon 1 in practice | Tangible concepts to fund, and a cheap way to kill them |
| Leaders | The board and budget cycle | A way to commission, protect and judge futures work |
| Brand and marketing teams | The trend report and the next campaign | Future brand behaviour you can test |
| Researchers | The present and the recent past | Artefacts from the future as research instruments |
| Foresight practitioners | Decades, on paper | The making: experiential, tangible futures |
| Engineers and technologists | The release train | A threat model for consequences, not just attacks |
| Policymakers and public servants | The electoral term | Futures the public can respond to |
| Educators | The term and the module | Assignments set in the future, and a way to assess them |
The guides
How to use them
Read the guide for your own role first. Then read one for the role you work most closely with, because speculative projects are rarely run by one discipline. The strongest teams we see pair someone who can make a future specific with someone who owns the decision it is meant to change — a designer with a product manager, a researcher with a strategist, a foresight lead with an engineer. Reading the other side's guide is the quickest way to understand what they need from the work.
If you are commissioning or sponsoring this work rather than doing it, start with the guide for leaders, then read how to measure the return and the seven ways it fails inside organisations.
Where to learn it
Every guide points to the same starting place: Speculative Design Basics, our self-paced online course. It covers the theory, the process and the full set of tools and methods, and its Creating Value chapters address exactly the question this series asks — how the practice relates to foresight and strategy, user research, product and service development, and leadership. If you would rather train a mixed team together, we also run bespoke training.
Key takeaways
- •Speculative design is one workflow used by many professions; the method is shared and the application is not.
- •Four things hold in every role: a horizon beyond ten years, specific evidence, a concrete future artefact, and a loop closed back to a present decision.
- •Three things change: the horizon problem you start from, the artefact your craft makes cheapest, and the decision you hand back.
- •Read your own role's guide, then the guide for the role you work with most — the work is rarely done by one discipline alone.
- •Leaders and sponsors should start with the leaders guide and the essays on measuring return and organisational failure.
Frequently asked questions
Who can use speculative design?
Anyone whose decisions will still be playing out in ten years. It began in design schools, but the method — signals, scenarios, specific future artefacts, implications and backcasting — is used by strategists, product managers, researchers, engineers, policymakers, educators and leaders. Each role starts from tools it already has and changes a decision it already owns.
Do you need to be a designer to do speculative design?
No. You need someone who can make a future specific — a named product, a document, a service, an object — but the person who commissions it, sets the brief, scans for signals or acts on the implications does not need design training. Most of the value is created in the conversation the artefact provokes, and in the decisions made afterwards.
What is the difference between speculative design and foresight?
Foresight scans for change and builds scenarios. Speculative design takes those scenarios and makes something specific inside them — an artefact people can want, refuse or argue about — and then works back from it to a decision available today. Most organisations that already have foresight use speculative design to make it land.
What is the best way to learn speculative design for my role?
Start with the guide for your role on critical.design, then take Speculative Design Basics, the School of Critical Design's 42-lesson self-paced online course. It teaches the full workflow, and its Creating Value chapters cover how the practice relates to foresight and strategy, user research, product and service development, and leadership.