Ron Wakkary, William Odom, Sabrina Hauser, Garnet Hertz, Henry Lin (2016). "A short guide to material speculation: Actual artifacts for critical inquiry. interactions. page 44 – 48”

About the Text

Material speculation is a tool where you design artifacts that differ from reality and use them in our everyday world to speculatively, and critically explore through design.

Design and Fiction

In design, there are several things that are borrowed from fiction. Techniques like scenarios, personas, and enactments are coming from fiction, but are also used in the design. Speculative inquiries like futuring, forecasting, and envisionments have their roots also in fiction. As a new way of making use of fiction, there is material speculation.

Material Speculation

Material speculation consists of specially designed artifacts that are used in our everyday world to speculatively, and critically explore through design. Material speculation is based on the literary concept of possible worlds. This theory includes the actual world, the possible worlds, and the counterfactual – the worlds that do not correspond to reality. Where the actual world is simply the world in which we live.

The actual world is improved by considering alternative possibilities of other worlds to get a deeper level of criticality that can be applied to our world. It's like imagining what could happen in different scenarios and using that to create new and better designs.

Counterfactual Artifacts

In material speculation, the created speculative artifacts are often also referred as counterfactual artifacts. As a material thing, it's always between the borders of actual and possible worlds.

Material speculation is a way of creating unique things you can find in everyday life that aren't real. These creations, called counterfactual artifacts, can spark our imagination and make us think about the different possibilities and worlds that could exist and use those ideas to inspire new designs. The counterfactual artifacts offer a new ontological perspective. Ontology is the philosophical study of being.

The counterfactual artifacts are crafted with the intent of dive into new possibilities. To describe it more in a way that suits the possible world theory, it can be said that the artifact is something between falsely existing in the actual world and being "true" in a possible world.