Applied Speculative Design

Applied Cultural Strategy

Applied Futures

Welcome to the School of Critical Design. We are an experimental design school dedicated to the application of emerging methods (like speculative design) to innovation, research, design and strategy.

We have over 15 years of experience applying speculative design methods to help organizations better understand the possibilities of and design the future.
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Our professional and academic courses and workshops, lectures and community, all offer new ways for individuals and organisations to meet the critical challenges facing our planet, people and businesses now, and the for next 1000 years.

Come and explore the future with us.

What is Speculative Design?

Speculative Design is the design of future products and services to understand the impact and implications of emerging technology and social or cultural trends.

Speculative Design is a discipline that seeks to help us understand anew our current state by exploring futures possibilities.

Speculative Design is closely related to critical design, design futures, or design fiction, with these variations emerging from the particular focus, interest, or intent of the designer.

Speculative Design disconnects design from the immediate needs of the business, industry, or the marketplace, and lets us use design to ask new kinds of questions, and create new kinds of value for the organization.

Speculative Design can enhance organizational decision making, by de-risking future possibilities, creating new context, and by generating empathy for future customers / citizens / employees / people / planet.

Speculative Design can work in research, strategy, product, service, and system contexts, in both innovation and development, and across various industries, both tech and non-tech focused.

Speculative Design is a radical expansion of purview, that reframes our current state options. By "closing the loop" we return from the explored future to a better understanding of product, investment, and research opportunities available to us today.

Speculative Design is in a normalizing phase of adoption, with companies and organizations training individuals, bringing the capabilities in house, and embedding futures practice into their process and decision making.

We are dedicated to the acceleration of this normalization, giving individuals and oranizations the tools and confidence to apply speculative design in their particular context and create new kinds of meaningful value.