Speculative Design
Most design solves problems. It makes chairs more comfortable, interfaces more intuitive, and buildings more efficient. But there’s another way to use design: as a means of speculating how things could be.
Speculative design doesn’t answer questions, it asks them. Questions that usually begin with “What if?” As humans, we tend to think about futures; sometimes through optimistic visions, sometimes through apocalyptic scenarios. But speculative design isn’t about predicting the future. Instead, it uses the future itself as a tool to speculate and explore possibilities.
Dunne & Raby’s “United Micro Kingdoms” (2012-2013)
Imagine England in 2037, carved into four experimental counties—each a living laboratory for a different ideology taken to its extreme. The Digitarians live on endless tarmac planes where self-driving cars navigate via market-determined tariffs and total surveillance. The Communo-Nuclearists ride a 3km-long nuclear-powered train that never stops, living in luxurious mobile carriages with swimming pools and farms, powered by limitless energy but despised and isolated due to their nuclear dependence. The Anarcho-Evolutionists hack their own bodies through DIY bio-experiments and self-training. The Bioliberals grow everything—food, products, even vehicle exteriors made from lab-grown yeast and tea skin.
The design: Complete with colorful model vehicles, detailed maps, animations showing traffic systems, and fabricated newspaper clippings, Dunne & Raby built an entire fictional nation. The work doesn’t predict the future—it holds up a mirror to present-day obsessions with technology, markets, sustainability, and control, asking which future we’re sleepwalking into.
Ai Hasegawa’s “I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin” (2011-2013)
What if human pregnancy could solve both overpopulation and species extinction? Hasegawa proposed synthesizing a “dolp-human placenta” that would allow women to gestate and give birth to endangered species like dolphins, tuna, or sharks. After birth, mothers would nurse them with synthetic high-fat milk. Then, potentially, eat them.
The design: The project includes clinical diagrams of dolphin fetuses in human wombs, detailed explanations of how the synthetic placenta would block human antibodies, medical documentation, and even a “bonding system” that transmits the mother’s stress to train the dolphin embryo for ocean predators. Hasegawa consulted with real embryologists to make it technically plausible. The work is simultaneously absurd and uncomfortably feasible, forcing us to confront questions about conservation, bodily autonomy, maternal instinct, food scarcity, and what we’re willing to sacrifice or transform to survive. Would you carry and birth your dinner? What would that do to your relationship with food, with nature, with your own body?
MIT Media Lab’s “Cocoon” (2018)
A glass dome you sleep under, covered in sensors tracking your brain activity, muscle tension, heart rate, and movement. As you descend into sleep, Cocoon detects which stage you’re in and begins programming your dreams through scent, audio cues, and muscle stimulation. Want to dream about flying? It stimulates your leg muscles to create kinesthetic sensations of movement. Need to process grief? It releases specific scents during REM sleep to guide emotional content. Seeking creative breakthroughs? It catches you in hypnagogia—that liminal state between wake and sleep—and feeds you targeted prompts.
The design: Created by MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group, Cocoon is presented as a “dystopian video” showing a near-future dream engineering device. But here’s what makes it chilling: all the technology in the video already exists. Dormio detects hypnagogia and influences visual dreams through audio. Essence alters emotional dream content. Electronight administers muscle stimulation to change kinesthetic dream experiences. The researchers built these devices and combined them into one speculative machine specifically to provoke discussion about the ethics of dream manipulation. The video has a Björk-meets-Black-Mirror aesthetic—saturated colors, close-ups of eyes, a person curled fetally under glass—designed to feel simultaneously seductive and invasive. It asks: if we can hack our unconscious minds, should we? What do we lose if dreaming becomes another optimizable productivity metric? The project spawned a whole Dream Engineering workshop and research community exploring these questions.
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