speculative design
Aurora – Speculative device for future prayer
Aurora is a speculative device designed to explore the act of prayer. It allows users to engage through proximity-based hand gestures to generate evolving, dreamlike soundscapes.
SlimeMoldCrypt – Security as a biological process
A speculative device that reimagines security as a biological process using a single-celled slime mold, as an unpredictable and dynamic encryption engine.
Future-Bored: Why We Need New Future Archetypes, Pt1
NORMALS propose a new framework for making futures more imaginative, immersive, playful, and useful: New Future Archetypes (NFAs) are immersive, authored future worlds designed to help people and orgs think differently about what’s ahead.
Designing Futures – Speculation, Critique, Innovation
Designing Futures provides designers with the methods and tools they need to develop discussable and tangible scenarios. It also outlines ways for creative people, activists and decision-makers in politics, science and the wider society to imagine...
PA3L – Synthetic Memory Interfaces
PA3L is an ongoing art project that explores the hazy boundaries between memory, identity, and technological mediation. PA3L takes the form of digital artifacts, each centered on a fictional avatar called SYNC3R, both human and machine, exists wit...
Sorn-Lai – Technosphere and post-singularity
"Sorn-Lai" is an immersive narrative set in a post-singularity world where biology and technology merge. In the White Forest, life fuses with AI and biotech. Through a researcher’s journey, it explores ethical and sustainable implications of our t...
Sonic Imagination – When We Grow Old
Sonic Imagination is a speculative auditive environment that places four scenarios for demographic change in Switzerland until the year 2070 on the Freilager-Platz in Basel. The project investigates the hypothesis that virtual sound sources in med...
Can You Imagine? – Soren Iverson
For nearly a year, Soren has been making unhinged interfaces daily. After publishing and selling out of his first book, it's time for V2. Can you imagine? 2 has over 365 concepts, writeups, and fun stories from Soren.
The Case for a Small Language Model – Generative AI and Authorship
The Case for a Small Language Model is a speculative AI installation inspired by the work of Dutch composer and poet Rozalie Hirs. The installation shows the entire book printed on five 30 meter long strips of labelprinter paper that scroll in bot...
Speculative Design: Past – Present – Future
This book will provide newcomers with a thorough introduction to the past, present and future of speculative design and related approaches. Experienced practitioners will have the opportunity to check in and learn more about diverse approaches, me...
Adnose – Anosmia and (ML) smell prediction
dnose is an interactive sculpture in the shape of a nose created at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) which combines image recognition and machine learning using a Raspberry Pi to predict the smell of any o...
Arche-Scriptures – Our digital traces in the future-past
'Arche-Scriptures' explores ceramics as a possible medium to store digital information. An artifact is found at a speculative archeological dig-site is being scanned by a decrypting machine, through which the visitor is invited to listen as the or...
Artificial Arboretum – Preservation of “photogrammetrees” found in Google Earth
‘Artificial Arboretum‘ by Jacqueline Wu is a project exploring the preservation, study, and public display of “photogrammetrees” found in Google Earth. The collection includes a range of diverse species harvested from their rendered world using th...
Artengine Digital Economies Lab – Call for Participants
Ottawa-based Artengine is looking for Canadian and U.S. artists, designers, and cultural producers to take part in its Digital Economies Lab (DEL), a "year-long exploration of the wonders and anguish of making art and culture in the 21st century."
CAN 2018 – Highlights and Favourites
As 2018 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular machines, intricate tools and mesmerising performances and installations to the new mediums for artistic enquiry – so many great new p...
Sight + Sound 2017 – A Spectrum of Non-Compliant Futures
The 2017 edition of Eastern Bloc’s Sight + Sound festival put ‘capital I’ innovation in its cross-hairs and pulled the trigger. We journeyed to Montreal to its flagship exhibition and assess its spectrum of ‘non-compliant futures.’
Ethical Autonomous Vehicles – Complexities of moral and ethical reasoning for driveless systems
Created by Matthieu Cherubini, Ethical Autonomous Vehicles project explores the implications of near-future scenario where most vehicles on the road are autonomous.
Dread Bass – AUDINT’s alternate timelines reverberate with fear and death
AUDINT is a European artist collective working across animation, installation, and publishing. Drawing on excerpts from an extended conversation with the group, we unpack their vision of the dystopian future-present and the nether zones that can b...
GIF Weaponry, Kid VR, RGB Fossils and Candy Clouds at the Digital Media Bremen
At the Digital Media study program in University of/the Arts Bremen, computer science meets design, while engineering and natural sciences interconnect with the arts. We present you four recent "semester" projects exploring top...
Dead Media – Mathilde Lavenne’s Artefact#0, Digital Necrophony
Artefact#0, Digital Necrophony is a recent installation by Lille-based artist Mathilde Lavenne that forgoes (burial and cremation) funerary convention in favour of sonification.
Performing Pedagogy – A Conversation with Ruairi Glynn
Interactive Architecture Lab founder Ruairi Glynn chats with CAN about the freshly-launched Design for Performance & Interaction (DfPI) programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
Gutfather – Capsule to transfer “Abdominal Feeling”
Created by Stefan Schwabe in collaboration with Fraunhofer CeRRI and Sebastian Kletzander, Gutfather is a speculative design project comprising a capsule that traverses the human organism and changes its shape through the influence of microbes unt...
Human Element Inc – Crowdwork services for everyday life
Created by Stephan Bogner and Philipp Schmitt, Human Element Inc. investigates how crowdwork, such as Amazon MechanicalTurk, might be woven into everyday life in the future— and explores the topic through three speculative crowdwork services.
Too Much Information – Keiichi Matsuda’s vision for augmented and mixed reality
Riding high on the wave of massive interest in his most recent work “Hyper-Reality,” which depicts a super-mediated Medellín, Colombia of the near future, director/designer Keiichi Matsuda chats with CAN about augmented reality, Silicon Valley, an...