In 1999, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, two designers at the Royal College of Art in London, published "Design Noir" — a book proposing a radical idea: design need not only solve problems. It can also create artefacts that provoke reflection, open debates and challenge the status quo. It was the birth of what we now call Speculative Design.
Dunne and Raby's insight started from a simple observation: traditional design is "affirmative" — it accepts the world as it is and seeks to improve it incrementally. A new smartphone, a more ergonomic chair, a more intuitive app. But what happens if design starts asking: "What if the world were different? What if technology worked another way? What if our priorities were different?".
Their PPPP framework (Probable, Plausible, Possible, Preferable) became a foundational tool. Probable futures are those we are heading towards if nothing changes. Plausible ones could happen with some changes. Possible ones require radical transformations. Preferable ones are those worth fighting for. Speculative design operates in these last three spaces — the territories of productive imagination.
But speculative design is not science fiction. It is not about imagining impossible worlds for the sake of the exercise. It is about creating artefacts — objects, services, experiences — that seem to come from a plausible future and that, in being familiar-yet-different, force those who encounter them to reflect on assumptions they took for granted.
Over the years, this approach has been adopted by museums (MoMA, V&A), universities (MIT Media Lab, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design), governments (UK Government Office for Science) and international organisations (UNDP, UNESCO). It is no longer an academic experiment: it is a recognised tool for navigating the complexity of the present.