Technological Futures and Recurring Dreams: Thinking About Emerging Technologies Through Speculative Design

This paper examines how an emerging technology can transition from the habitat of the laboratory to everyday life, with a particular focus on the different roles design can play throughout this process. Design is intrinsically linked to notions of the future, through the arrangement of elements to accomplish predetermined goals. More familiar is design's near-future role - the arrangement of existing elements to create useful, marketable objects. However, design also has an important role in longer-term planning through the arranging of potential elements to create hypothetical objects and related future imaginaries - visions of how the future could be, should that technology reach maturity. First, we trace the typical journey of a technology through three distinct phases: from its 'genesis' in a scientific laboratory, through the 'imaginary' phase where the emerging technology's potential is transformed into a vision of how the future could be, to the development of an actual product or service for use in everyday life. Next, we present a list of reasons why dreams of the future have stagnated, with an emphasis on how design is implicated in this process. Finally, we present three speculative design projects by PhD students, each working in a different phase of the tripartite process: placing the designer in the laboratory to upstream prototype and infuse scientific research with social responsibility and/or domestic sensibilities; revisiting stagnant technological dreams and updating through the counterfactual history approach; and downstream 'super testing' using speculative methods to better understand the implications of technologies in everyday life.