Speculative design gives foresight practitioners the making half of futures work: a way to turn a scenario into an object, a document, a service or a staged situation that people can handle, argue with and act on. It does not replace horizon scanning, STEEP, 2×2 scenarios or Three Horizons. Scanning and scenarios are the front half of the speculative design workflow, and foresight built them. What speculative design adds is specificity at the point where scenario work usually stops.
You will recognise most of the workflow we teach. Signals, trends, the future wheel, scenarios: none of it is ours, and we tell designers so. What speculative design adds comes afterwards — named concepts, prototypes built to a chosen fidelity, implications worked outwards from human experience, and backcasting into the organisation's own decisions. Our comparison with design fiction and futures studies draws the lines; this guide is about the join.
What foresight practitioners already have
A scanning practice with a database behind it. STEEP, or one of its longer cousins, so the scan does not only see technology. Drivers, critical uncertainties, and the 2×2 that turns two of them into four worlds. Delphi rounds for expert judgement, Three Horizons for talking about transition, wind-tunnelling to test a strategy against the set, signposts to watch. Above all, a professional ethic: plurality over prediction, and the habit of saying "this is not a forecast" before anyone asks.
That ethic is the head start. Most designers who come to futures work have to be taught not to predict. Foresight practitioners need a different and smaller lesson: how to make one future concrete without letting it become the forecast.
The horizon problem foresight actually has
Foresight does not have a short-horizon problem. You already work at ten, twenty or thirty years. The problem is distance: the gap between the horizon of the work and the horizon of the people reading it. A board deciding a three-year plan reads a 2045 scenario set once, agrees with it, and returns to the plan. The scenarios were right about their own horizon and irrelevant to the reader's.
Two features of good practice widen that gap. Scenario sets are plural and balanced by design, which makes each scenario abstract: four worlds named after the ends of two axes, with nobody living in them. And review pulls scenarios towards the middle of the futures cone, into the plausible band, where nothing surprises anyone. Jim Dator's second law of the future, as the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies quotes it, holds that "any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous". Plausibility review is where most scenario sets lose their ridiculous edge.
A specific thing crosses that gap better than a narrative does.
Where speculative design fits in a foresight process
| You already use | Its speculative counterpart | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Scanning hits in a signals database | The same signals, held to who, when and what, used to seed a future wheel | A route from a hit to consequences two and three rings out |
| STEEP categories | The Implications Pie: STEEP plus cultural and ethical, aimed at a made thing | Interrogates the consequences of one artefact, not the drivers of a field |
| 2×2 scenario narratives | An artefact from inside each quadrant | Something the audience can hold, refuse or argue with |
| Delphi rounds | Reaction sessions built around artefacts | Responses to a thing rather than to a statement |
| Wind-tunnelling | "How does it go wrong?" applied to a concept | Failure modes of a specific product or service, not only of the strategy |
| Three Horizons | A third-horizon artefact, backcast | Shows which second-horizon moves the third horizon depends on |
| Signposts and indicators | Backcasting rungs with named owners | Indicators someone inside the organisation is answerable for |
The Implications Pie uses nearly the same categories as STEEP, with culture and ethics added, but runs them the other way: STEEP scans for drivers before anything has been made, while the Pie interrogates the consequences of something that has, and so finds the cultural and political implications a driver analysis tends to file under "social".
Briefing designers, and deciding how much to build
The handover to designers is where the work is usually lost. Three habits help.
Brief with evidence, not mood. Give the designer the scenario, the dated signals beneath it, the audience, and the decision the work is meant to inform. A designer given only a scenario title will produce something handsome and generic.
Make fidelity a decision. Ask for the minimum fidelity at which the idea becomes arguable to this audience: a written artefact, a printed object, a staged situation, a working service. Stuart Candy's 2010 doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa set out experiential futures: staging fragments of a future world, in any medium, so that people encounter it rather than read about it. One of its design principles, "the art of the double take", is built on Dator's second law. For a cheap start, The Thing From The Future (Candy and Jeff Watson's Situation Lab, 2014) is a card game in which players describe objects from a prompted future.
Insist on provenance. Every artefact should carry the scenario it belongs to and the signals behind it, on its reverse if nowhere else. An object that cannot point back to its evidence will be judged on taste.
A worked example: the scenario set that was read and filed
What follows is illustrative. Imagine a foresight team of three inside a soft-drinks bottler with plants in several water-stressed regions. It has done everything right: a thorough scan, a 2×2 with "water allocated by price or by public priority" on one axis and "drought as slow decline or sudden emergency" on the other, four well-written scenarios. The executive team read them at the strategy offsite and filed them.
The brief. Make one quadrant, Last in the Queue (public priority, sudden emergencies), arguable to the executive team. Horizon: 2040. The decision it informs: the specification and siting of the next bottling plant.
Signals. The team already has them, probably tagged "water conflict". In March 2020, on a low turnout, 76.1 per cent of voters in a public consultation in Mexicali, in arid northern Mexico, backed cancelling a brewery Constellation Brands was building there over its water use; the company accepted the result. In June 2023, after two months of mixing brackish estuary water into Montevideo's supply, Uruguay declared a state of emergency, removed taxes on bottled water and paid for it for hundreds of thousands of residents. What is new is the discipline of using one as a seed.
Future wheel. Take Mexicali and assume it is fully realised: an industrial user's water depends on local consent, renewed every drought. The first ring is already in every corporate water strategy: water risk in site selection, efficiency targets, community engagement. In the second, a soft drink becomes a visible and contested use of water in an emergency. In the third, Montevideo's answer generalises: bottling lines are the fastest way to get drinking water to a town, so the plant joins the emergency plan whether the company likes it or not.
The concept. Stage Four. Tagline: "Same line. Different customer." A notice for the staff entrance of a 2040 bottling plant, issued under a fictional regional drought order. It tells the shift that at 06:00 the site moves to Stage Four: flavoured lines stop, the plant bottles plain drinking water for the local authority, output is allocated by the water authority rather than the sales team, and the company's logo comes off the labels. A gauge shows the reservoir against four stage thresholds. The sketch: an A3 sheet, company letterhead next to a council crest, the gauge, a shift rota.
Staging it. The fidelity decision: a printed notice and a stocked fridge. At the next offsite the executive team finds the notice on the meeting-room door, and the drinks fridge holds nothing but plain water in the company's bottles, unbranded. That is Candy's double take: ridiculous at first, then plainly an operational problem of rotas, liabilities and an unagreed invoice. To protect the plurality of the set, a second artefact sits beside it from the opposite quadrant (price allocation, slow decline): the plant's water bill under a scarcity tariff. Neither is the forecast.
Implications. From human experience outwards: a line worker bottling water for her own street; a resident collecting unbranded bottles in a familiar shape. Socially, the plant becomes civic infrastructure. Culturally, the brand becomes a lifeline. Politically, someone other than the company decides when the lines change over. Ethically, shipping product out of a Stage Three catchment needs a justification. Economically, flavour lines sit idle and someone has to pay for the water; environmentally, an emergency is also a plastic surge. And how it goes wrong: the plant changes over on time, the town's distribution fails, and the photographs of pallets stacked at the gate show the company's bottles.
Backcasting. Working back from the notice: local consent for industrial water (Mexicali); bottled supply as a public duty in emergencies (Montevideo); a legal list of what a drought order may stop. In England, the Drought Direction 2011 already lists the purposes a drought order can ban, among them operating a mechanical vehicle-washer and cleaning industrial plant. Below that sits a changeover agreement with the water authority, and lines engineered to switch product in hours. Backcasting shows which rung has an owner and a date: the engineering specification for the next plant, which is being written now.
What changes this quarter. The 2×2 is reissued with an artefact for two quadrants. The siting study for the next plant gains two criteria, changeover capability and local consent. The watchlist of drought-order applications gets an owner in operations as well as in foresight, which turns a signpost into somebody's job. And the team starts a decision log, to show later that the work changed a decision, not a mood.
Where it goes wrong for foresight teams
The report nobody reads. You know this one. An artefact only helps if it travels without the report. If it needs forty pages of context to make sense, it is an illustration, not an artefact.
The beautiful object in an empty room. The designer's version of the same failure: the object is made, admired at an away day, and cut loose from the evidence and the decision it was meant to serve. Provenance on the reverse and a backcast before the showing are the cheapest defences.
One vivid future. A single artefact is more persuasive than a balanced set, so it quietly becomes the forecast, undoing the ethic foresight exists to protect. Make artefacts for at least two scenarios and show them together. The point, as we argue against forecast-led strategy, is preparedness, not prediction.
A first exercise using your last scenario set
- 1.Take your most recent scenario set and pick the scenario your audience found least comfortable.
- 2.Pull three dated signals for it from your scanning database: who, when, what. If you cannot find three, that is a finding about the scenario.
- 3.Run a 45-minute future wheel on one signal, two rings past where your scenario narrative stops.
- 4.Choose an everyday document someone in that world would handle on an ordinary Tuesday: a menu, a timetable, a payslip, a notice. Give it a name, a tagline and a description, and sketch it on one side of A4.
- 5.Print the scenario name and the signals on its reverse.
- 6.Make a second, quicker artefact for the scenario in the opposite corner of your 2×2.
- 7.Show both to five people from your usual audience, without the report. Ask what they would do and who they would blame, and note what they argue about.
- 8.Backcast one rung: name a decision in the next budget cycle that looks different in this future, and the person who owns it.
Where to learn the making half
Speculative Design Basics is a self-paced course of 42 lessons, taught by J. Paul Neeley. The parts that matter are the Creating Value chapter on how speculative design relates to foresight and strategy, the Tools & Methods chapters on future prototyping and backcasting, and the case studies of practitioners such as Superflux, Extrapolation Factory and Near Future Laboratory. The guides for strategists and researchers cover the handovers either side of yours. The full series is at speculative design for every role.
Key takeaways
- •The front half of the speculative design workflow is foresight; speculative design augments horizon scanning, STEEP and scenario methods rather than replacing them.
- •Foresight's horizon problem is distance: the gap between the horizon of the work and that of the people who read it.
- •A specific artefact or staged situation carries a scenario across that gap; that is the argument of Stuart Candy's experiential futures.
- •Brief designers with evidence, decide fidelity explicitly, and put provenance on every artefact.
- •Make artefacts for more than one scenario so the vivid one is not read as the forecast, and backcast to a rung with an owner and a date.
Frequently asked questions
What does speculative design add to strategic foresight?
Making. Foresight produces scanning hits, drivers and scenario narratives; speculative design turns a scenario into something specific people can handle, such as an object, a document, a service or a staged situation, then works through its implications and backcasts to present-day decisions. It sits on top of horizon scanning, STEEP and scenario methods rather than replacing them.
Is speculative design the same as experiential futures?
They overlap heavily. Experiential futures, set out by Stuart Candy in his 2010 doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, stages fragments of a future world in any medium so that people encounter it rather than read about it. Speculative design comes from the design side, through Dunne and Raby, and puts more weight on the designed artefact, its implications and backcasting into strategy.
How should a foresight team brief a designer?
Give the designer the scenario, the dated signals behind it, the audience and the decision the work is meant to inform. Ask for the minimum fidelity at which the idea becomes arguable to that audience. Insist that every artefact carries its provenance, meaning the scenario and signals it came from, and that more than one scenario in the set gets an artefact.
Won't a vivid artefact be mistaken for a forecast?
It can be, because one specific thing is more persuasive than four balanced narratives. The defence is plurality: make artefacts for more than one scenario, show them together, and say plainly that none is a prediction. The useful question to ask of an artefact is not whether it will happen, but which of today's decisions look different if it did.
Where can a futurist learn the design side of speculative design?
Speculative Design Basics, the School of Critical Design's self-paced online course taught by J. Paul Neeley, has a chapter on how speculative design relates to foresight and strategy, and Tools and Methods chapters including future prototyping and backcasting. Its case studies include Superflux, Extrapolation Factory and Near Future Laboratory. It assumes no prior design experience.