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Speculative Design explores future possibilities and societal impacts of emerging technology and shifting cultural and social trends, diverging from traditional design to provoke new thought, debate, directions, preferences, and strategy.

"What is the difference between Speculative Design and Design Fiction?" – This is a question that invites us into a nuanced exploration of two closely related, yet distinct, fields within the broader umbrella of futures design. Both fields are concerned with the future and both employ imagination and creativity to explore possibilities beyond the constraints of current reality. However, their approaches, objectives, and methodologies reveal subtle differences.

Speculative Design goes beyond solving current problems, focusing instead on what could happen in the future. It uses design as a tool to create scenarios, products, and services that question current trends and explore the implications of emerging technologies, societal changes, and environmental challenges. Let’s look at some compelling speculative design examples that illustrate the depth and diversity of the approach.

CAPS LOCK uses clear language and visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. By sharing examples of radical design practices that challenge the supremacy of the market, it hopes to inspire a different kind of graphic design.

The Dawn of Everything aims to fundamentally transform our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.

Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of urban ecologists studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be.

‘Deep adaptation’ refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for – and live with – a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies. It is a framework for responding to the terrifying realization of increasing disruption by committing ourselves to reducing suffering while saving more of society and the natural world.

The Earth has reached a tipping point. Runaway climate change, the sixth great extinction of planetary life, the acidification of the oceans - all point toward an era of unprecedented turbulence in humanity's relationship within the web of life. But just what is that relationship, and how do we make sense of this extraordinary transition?

School of Critical Design Co-founder and cultural semiotician Gemma Jones sat down for a long-distance chat with Fellow Ted Hunt to talk about his latest project, Circa Lunar

Evening lecture/ 23 July 2019

Extinction Rebellion is a global activist movement of ordinary people, demanding action from Governments. This is a book of truth and action. It has facts to arm you, stories to empower you, pages to fill in and pages to rip out, alongside instructions on how to rebel - from organising a roadblock to facing arrest.

In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures.

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.

World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated.

The Value of Everything reigniteS a long-needed debate about the kind of world we really want to live in.

In The Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual, Montgomery and Woebken illuminate their work to democratize futures research, elucidating strategies culled from think tanks and futurists as well as models and techniques they've developed for organizing collaborative futures explorations.

In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.

After chapters that introduce the science and set the terms of the discussion, the book follows six boundary-crossing collaborations between artists and designers and synthetic biologists from around the world, helping us understand what it might mean to 'design nature.'

Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: "Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable." His project and proposals challenge it to do so.

Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.

Why are there so many crises in the world? Is it true that the global system is today riskier and more dangerous than in past decades? Do we have any tools at our disposal to bring these problems under control, to reduce the global system's proneness to instability? These are the tantalizing questions addressed in this book.

The interpretive science of semiotics offers powerful analytical tools for the application of many disciplines to the study of perception. Semiotics is the study of signs, and as such, is of relevance to a wide spectrum of scholars and professionals, including social scientists, psychologists, artists, graphic designers, and students of literature.

Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life.

Words are our first tools for making sense of the world. A SUSTAINIST LEXICON presents seven words for a changing time. In this timely exploration of our cities, heritage, civic initiatives, urbanism and the future, Michiel Schwarz, co-creator of the Sustainism manifesto, charts how a new ethos and praxis is emerging in the ‘design’ of our living environment.

No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis, Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book--one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them.