Speculative Design for Industrial Designers: Objects as Arguments, Built for Their Afterlife

Speculative design gives industrial designers a way to use an object as an argument about the future rather than an answer for the present. Instead of resolving a product for next year's shelf, you design the thing a world ten or fifteen years away would contain — its materials, its joins, its repairs, its later owners — and use it to test which of today's decisions about form, CMF and manufacture still hold.

This is home ground, since the practice grew out of object-centred work. What industrial designers usually lack is the method around the craft: dated evidence before the object, implications and backcasting after it. For definitions, start with what speculative design is; for the full sequence, the practitioner's workflow.

What industrial designers already have

Most of the toolkit is already in the studio. You know a rough sketch draws different comments from a render. You make foam models, run CMF boards, design-for-manufacture reviews and teardowns, and build appearance models that persuade a gate review a product exists when it does not. Those are speculative skills, pointed at next year.

The practice also began with your kind of object. Hertzian Tales began as Anthony Dunne's 1997 RCA PhD and was published by the college in 1999. It was addressed to designers of electronic products, and proposed the product as a "post-optimal object", valued not for further optimisation but for prompting reflection on the invisible electronic environment it belonged to. It argued through proposals, one of them a chair: the Faraday Chair. The Design Interactions programme Dunne led at the RCA from 2005 to 2015, with Fiona Raby, carried that object-first approach into speculative design. (Our co-founder J. Paul Neeley studied there with both of them.) Our reading note on Hertzian Tales covers the book.

The most useful outside term is David Kirby's. In a 2010 paper in Social Studies of Science, he described the diegetic prototype: a technology shown working inside a film so that audiences come to see it as needed, viable and benign. Your appearance model already does something similar for a gate review. Speculative design keeps the craft and changes the purpose: the prop is built to be argued with rather than wanted, and it may show harm as well as benefit.

Why your objects outlive the brief

Industrial design has an odd relationship with time. The brief is written for a market that exists now; the tooling is committed for years; then the object ships and stays in use long after the brief, the team and sometimes the company have moved on. Every product you sign off is sent into a future nobody designed it for.

The rituals meant to look ahead do not look far. A CMF trend presentation looks a couple of seasons out; a platform roadmap looks to the next refresh. Both are about launch, not year ten: the second owner, the part no longer made, the skip. We set the horizon beyond ten years, which is where the work earns its keep and, for a durable product, where most of its life is spent. The gap is closing from outside, too: in Europe, repairability is becoming compliance on roughly the timescale of a tooling cycle.

Where speculative design fits in product development

The artefacts stay the same. What changes is the moment they are about: not the sale, but the life after it.

A worked example: a task chair for its fourth owner

Take a hypothetical in-house team at a mid-sized European maker of office seating, about to start a task-chair platform that will be tooled within two years and, if it sells, produced for most of a decade. The team is invented; the signals are not.

The brief. Pair a source of change with a domain and fix the horizon: in 2040, if every chair sold in Europe carries a trusted record of its materials, repairs and owners, what does a task chair have to be? The audience is the product leadership that signs off the platform.

Signals.

• •On 18 July 2024 the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation entered into force, extending ecodesign rules beyond energy-related products to most physical goods and creating the Digital Product Passport, a record reached through a data carrier on the product.
• •On 16 April 2025 the European Commission published the regulation's first working plan. Furniture was among the first product groups prioritised.
• •From 24 November to 3 December 2020, IKEA offered to buy back used furniture in 27 countries for store credit of up to half the original price, scaled down for scratches and wear.

The trend: a product's life after sale becoming visible, priced and regulated, inside the megatrend of the circular economy.

The future wheel. Put the passport at the centre and assume it is fully realised. The first ring is the circular-economy pitch: refurbishers can verify a used chair and resale prices become predictable. In the second, a chair with a clean record becomes an asset with a residual value, leasing makes sense, and the maker competes with its own used stock; every scratch has a price, as the IKEA scheme implied. In the third, the chair's record becomes a record of its sitters, the right to write to the passport becomes the commercial fight, and designers stop hiding wear and start designing wear that reads as care. (More in what a futures wheel is.)

The concept.

• •Name: Relay, by a fictional maker we will call Arden Seating.
• •Tagline: Built for its fourth owner.
• •Description: A task chair sold with a buy-back price stated at purchase, falling on a published schedule. Every wear part (castors, gas lift, arm pads, foam, mesh) comes off with the one hex key clipped under the seat. Foam is held mechanically, never bonded. The frame is a single grade of recycled aluminium, left bare; the colour lives in a fabric cover each new owner chooses. Under the seat, a stamped steel plate gains a line at every refurbishment (date, part, repairer's mark), so the chair carries its history even if the manufacturer's servers do not last until 2040.
• •Sketch: Almost under-designed. Matt metal, bolts set out with care, a bright cover, and the plate, which is the first thing anyone turns the chair over to read.

The plate is the twist: it says the record should belong to the object, not the company's database. That makes Relay an argument rather than a nice chair.

Implications. Start with an ordinary day. A graduate in 2040 is issued a chair with three lines on its plate; she can see the gas lift was replaced in 2034, and by whom. Culturally, a new chair in an office starts to read as waste rather than status. In CMF, gloss, soft-touch coatings and pale fabrics drop out. Economically, margin migrates from the first sale to refurbishment, which changes what the design team is measured on. Politically, the passport is the battleground.

How does it fail? The buy-back price is honoured only if every repair was authorised, and the passport becomes the instrument of the lock-in repair rules were meant to end. Or the plate becomes a premium feature: the expensive chair is circular, the cheap one stays glued, and repairability turns into a luxury.

Backcasting. Stand in 2040 and work back. The working plan names furniture, but the requirements arrive later through a product-specific act, shaped by preparatory and standards work over the next few years, with industry in the room. Someone has to define what counts as a repair in a passport, and who may write one. A buy-back price at sale means finance must book a residual value, which needs a model of how the chair ages, so the designers' knowledge becomes a financial input. Lifetime parts mean supplier commitments longer than today's contracts. And the platform about to be tooled will still be in production when all this lands. Only that last rung sits in the studio; the rest have owners elsewhere in the building, which is why they are worth finding. (Backcasting covers the method.)

What changes this quarter. A timed, one-hex-key disassembly test joins the platform's design review, and every bonded joint needs a written reason. The CMF brief asks how each surface looks at year twelve. A fourth owner and a refurbisher join the persona set. Procurement asks which suppliers would commit to parts for fifteen years. Nobody has to believe in Relay, only to accept that the chair about to be tooled will live in something like its world.

Where it goes wrong for industrial designers

The beautiful object in an empty room. You are the best in any room at making a speculative object desirable, and that is the risk. A finely resolved prop at a design week is photographed, admired and filed. Without implications and a backcast, nothing changes.

Chrome. The future as a finish: glossy white, chrome, seamless shells, light bleeding from a split line. Besides being a cliché, it often contradicts the future proposed — seamless often means glued, and gloss is the finish of an object nobody expects to age. Find the detail that belongs to this signal and this product. In a repair future, it may be the screw head.

Resolving too far. A production-quality model invites production questions — draft angles, wall sections, tool cost — and the room starts solving the object instead of arguing about the world. Build at the lowest fidelity at which the idea becomes arguable.

Only showing the first day. Speculative products are nearly always shown new. If your prop has no scuffs, no repairs and no previous owner, you have designed a launch, not a future.

A first exercise for industrial designers

1. 1.Put a product your team shipped recently on the bench, with only the tools a customer would own.
2. 2.Take it apart against a stopwatch. Photograph every joint that needs heat, solvent, a special tool or force.
3. 3.Write its biography to 2040 in half a page: owners, repairs, the part that fails first, where it ends up.
4. 4.Find three signals that bear on that biography (a regulation, a take-back scheme, a supplier announcement), each with who, when and what.
5. 5.Draw a future wheel for one of them, three rings deep, and pick the consequence that would change a joint or a material.
6. 6.Make the product as it would be in that world, in foam and card, with a name and a tagline.
7. 7.Take it to your next design review as a question: what would have to be true for us to make this? Mark the rungs that have an owner in the building.

Where to learn speculative design as an industrial designer

This method is taught in full in Speculative Design Basics, our self-paced online course, taught by J. Paul Neeley: 42 lessons, lifetime access, no prior experience assumed. For industrial designers the Tools & Methods chapters do most of the work — signals, future wheels, future prototyping (where the fidelity decision lives) and backcasting — and the Process chapters show how the workflow sits alongside the design process you already run. Your engineering colleagues have their own guide, speculative design for engineers, and speculative design for graphic designers covers the labels and notices that make a future object believable; both are part of speculative design for every role.

Key takeaways

• •Speculative design lets industrial designers use an object as an argument about the future, tested against today's decisions.
• •The practice began with objects, in Hertzian Tales and the RCA's Design Interactions programme, so your craft is a head start.
• •Your horizon problem is that objects outlive their briefs; look beyond ten years.
• •Treat the appearance model as a diegetic prototype built to be argued with, and show it in its tenth year.
• •Avoid chrome; in a repair future, the telling detail may be the screw head.
• •Backcast to rungs with owners — regulation, standards, finance, suppliers, tooling — and change the current platform this quarter.