Summary

These futures were developed using a design approach called science fiction prototyping, a type of speculative futures tactic. For more on speculative futures and how you can use them in your own work, life, and community, explore Johanna Hoffman's new book, Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Cities We Need, published by North Atlantic Books and Penguin Random House (2022)

The Takeaway

By giving us permission to imagine, speculative futures encourage a shift in attitude from “What’s the problem?” to “What’s possible?” In doing so, they question our assumptions about existing norms to see if they’re really the paradigms we want to shape what lies ahead. Connecting current moves to long-term change helps ensure that the tactics used to solve short-term problems can address the fifty- or one-hundred-year issues as well. Speculative futures offer practices that create the forward-thinking, adaptive plans that modern uncertainty requires.

Most importantly, the approaches aren’t exclusive or specialized. Using speculative futures doesn’t depend on getting a degree or buying expensive software. Anyone can employ them, because everyone has the capacity to imagine. When more people feel empowered to envision their preferred futures, they’re more equipped to advocate for their needs. More people promoting the futures they want encourages design and planning professionals to embrace the role of facilitators, to focus less on enacting their own ideas and more on coalescing diverse viewpoints into cohesive plans. In this way, speculative futures cultivates self-determination, creating cities more likely to work not just for the few, but for all.

The Problem

We’ve limited our imaginations of what cities can be for too long. Predictive and persuasive modes of speculation have resulted in urban spaces that perpetuate the status quo. Legacies of inequality, where exclusive development approaches fail to include the concerns of marginalized residents, are metastasizing into crises. By tying our visions of urbanism to doing things the ways they’ve been done before, we’ve locked ourselves into conditions primed for dystopian demise.

The Tools

Speculative futures is a widely employed umbrella term for the array of design approaches used to create high-resolution visions of potential realities. Science fiction is a form of speculative futures. The worldbuilding that shapes Marvel films is another. The range of tactics that provocatively explore what the future could become is what many call speculative futures.

The field speculative futures offers design tools to create the resilient cities this century demands. Imagining what a future might sound, smell, and taste like provides visceral connections to the impacts of potential change. The more vivid an experience of an alternative future is, the more robust our responses to it become. The stronger our responses become, the deeper our debates about preferred alternatives can go. The more we debate, the more we can identify and enact the futures that work for more of us.

Speculative futures tools help us:

• challenge the status quo

• increase individual and social resilience

• balance short-term needs with long-term change, reorienting our understanding of cities toward more adaptive capacity

• create more collaborative and equitable development by supporting cooperation over persuasion

• shift our collective imagination toward resilient possibility and cultivate more proactive planning as a result

The Types

For more information on types, definitions, example projects, and more, check out this very non-exhaustive compendium of speculative futures design resources.

The Framework

For more information on how to use speculative futures tools to challenge the status quo, shift systemic power inequities, and co-create more resilient, equitable futures, check out this quick, non-exhaustive speculative futures how-to-guide.

The Bigger Picture

Navigating modern change depends on imagining futures we’ve never seen. That tomorrow will be worse than today is far from guaranteed. Where we go from here—whether we accept that dystopian futures are inevitable or start envisioning more resilient spaces—is up to us. To head toward different, potentially better futures, we have to be able to imagine what those futures might be like

The growing field of speculative futures provides essential, practical approaches to creating the resilient cities we need. Its tools empower design professionals and urban residents alike to work with the future today, democratizing development as a result. Our survival on this planet depends on cocreating nimble responses to accelerating speeds, scopes, and scales of change. By providing containers for collective imagination of what the future can bring, speculative futures helps us create those responses together.