futures/

speculative research devices

Speculative research devices are designed objects that are in an ongoing state of open-ness to creating new more-than-human arrangements, without moving towards a finalised, fixed, or stabilised end-point. This is a novel conception of the prototype, whereby the introduction of new objects to a setting is unfolding new (more-than-human) relations; to disturb or ‘stir’ a given situation, and to bring about new arrangements for analysis by a researcher. They require a different methodological concern to a typical (or 'normative') prototype; to remain unsettled, to slow us down, and to always seek to find something (else) out by way of material intervention, that is not only concerned with the object itself, and without necessarily achieving consensus.

There are important practicalities to this prototyping practice and the co-becoming of design and social research, whereby it is necessary to draw from the skills and training of designers in producing and mobilising interventions, and therefore what it is possible for design-research to investigate. The production of research devices and prototypes represents a space where designers collaborate with and make a contribution to the social sciences through designing, making and deploying things, and therefore potentially finding _different_ things out as a result. There is a symmetry to the becoming of these two disciplines: whereas a normative design logic might not recognise these objects as design (for example they are not concerned with making ‘better’ objects for a market) the methods and concepts from the social sciences contribute to, and give an alternative set of logics for how design can be done and understood in order to conduct research.

by Liam Healy

key references

Healy L. (2023) Everything is a prototype, but not at all in the same way: Towards an ecology of prototyping. STS Encounters 15(2). 2.
Wilkie A. (Forthcoming) Reciprocal capture & empirical speculation: How well does ANT equip designers for socio-material speculations? In: The Routledge Companion to ANT.

A device containing prompts for participants to reflect on their relationships to other-than-human communities at Redmires Reservoirs. Users are invited to respond while walking through drawing and collecting

Two ‘DUF agent kits’, containing custom made name badges/IDs, pen, notepad and Chupa Chup lolly, designed to enrol new contributors to a set of collaboratively produced zines.

Side view of the interview bike — a custom made tandem complete with audio and video ‘rigs’ for capturing roving interviews.

PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH PROJECT

Prototyping Multi-species Encounters:

Relating to Redmires Reservoirs’ Residents

Project

Co-designing Forests

project team

Liam Healy and The Wild Life Trust

project summary & operationalising the notion of the future

This project prototypes, deploys and trials a set of design-research devices — custom designed objects, such as maps, cards and cameras containing prompts and questions for gathering research data from different publics in 'wild' places' to trial new ways of fostering more-than-human interactions and inter-species connections between dogs, water voles, curlew, humans, trees, water, toads, and so on. The devices will be designed to invite speculative and creative ways of engaging with the sites, while providing materials for the research team to later analyse. This approach to design-research has three key intentions: 1) To make a lasting positive impact by trialling novel techniques that improve the site’s conditions (e.g. by human behaviour change) for key species so that an increase in their population and health is observable. 2) To advance debates around more-than-human co-design by trialling new interventions and strategies in a real-world setting with various publics alongside social research methods to analyse their effectiveness. 3) To develop an immediate response to the site’s challenges by prototyping new modes of interspecies encounters and relating that advance the agenda of entanglement theory and multispecies justice: fields that explore how complex relationships between human inequalities and ecological crises can be negotiated.

methods to project future(s)

Theoretically, the project approach draws on research-through-design (Gaver 2012) and cosmopolitical prototyping (Yaneva and Zaera-Polo 2016; Healy 2023) to seek new ways for design to speculate on non-human agency in design processes. With insights from science and technology studies the speculative designs produced will be empirically observed and analysed (Kerridge 2016) to investigate the ways design might be employed in the management of MtH relationships. Empirically, the project looks at ways to develop new forms of public engagement with wild places and their residents. Currently this project has prototyped a series of devices to generate insights into how human and non-human communities interact on the site and include hand-held digital tools for viewing, listening to, and documenting the wildlife on the site, ‘analogue’ drawing and mapping devices, and in future will involve a site-specific installation of a ‘radio broadcast’ of the site’s endangered species.

entanglements of justice in future(s) & design

This project engages with multi-species justice by prototyping design-research devices that respond to both human and more-than-human habitats, fostering new understandings of ecological entanglements. In doing so, it challenges human-centered perspectives and rather proposes an ongoing negotiation between human and non-human worlds as tested by means of prototyping and advocates for interdependent ways of living and being.

references

Gaver W. (2012) What Should We Expect from Research Through Design? In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, 2012, pp. 937–946. CHI ’12. ACM.

Yaneva A. and Zaera-Polo A. (2016) What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment. Farnham Burlington, VT: Routledge.

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