Embracing the Future of Learning through Speculative Design
“In a world of uncertainty where school was so bland, where subjects were so bleak, where students were so bored” (FoL co-designer, 2023), we introduce the Futures of Learning Research Exhibition and launch the Futures of Learning Speculative Co-Design Toolkit, created by young people and teachers for young people and teachers in partnership with SWISP Lab.
The Futures of Learning arises from the urgent need for innovative models of community-based education that explore human-land-technology relationships as collective expression and mobilisation of knowledge. It engages with grand challenges affecting young people, particularly those associated with the climate crisis and intensified use of digital technologies which can both mitigate and contribute to ecological collapse. The resulting Speculative Co-Design Toolkit is an educational adventure, inviting design teachers and students alike to delve into the realm of speculation, transcending the boundaries of the present now to envision tomorrows to come. Kate Coleman, the Chief Instigator of the project sought funding for this work because she saw the need to raise the profile of design education, particularly speculative design. Kate wanted to support design teacher education and work in partnership with teachers and young people to encourage imagination to flow freely about learning in a post-covid world. She was thrilled to have the project funded by the Creative Futures Design Research and Education Fund at the University of Melbourne.
We changed … but learning did not
(FoL co-designer, 2023)
So, welcome to a journey of criticality, creativity, imagination, innovation and speculative wondering in Anthropogenic times. What is clear is that the Anthropogenic times that we live in – whether you agree with the concept of the Anthropocene or not – are not merely about global warming but encompasses the idea of ‘climate’ in every sense of the word, and we’re not just talking about the weather here. We’re also talking about the racialised, gendered, political, economic, settler-colonial climate that has led to this historic moment.
Why locate this post-pandemic speculative design toolkit exploring the futures of learning in Anthropogenic times? Because “climate change (and global practices that contribute to it) is plausibly understood as having constituted the very circumstances in which the COVID-19 pandemic was possible at scale. As Zorana J. Andersen and colleagues advise, ‘The COVID-19 pandemic has painfully demonstrated the close interconnectedness of a fossil fuel-based economy, climate change, air pollution and emerging infectious diseases’ (Andersen et al., 2021: 4) and is thus a visible global articulation of the relationship among public health, air quality and climate change”. (Pink, Strengers, and Korsmeyer, 2024).
At the launch, held in The University of Melbourne’s studioFive on February 27, 2024, we came together as a community of designers, educators, young people, and researchers to revisit the incredible work that 50 young people and teachers did with us at SWISP Lab to reimagine how design can help us make sense of being in the world. To get to this fabulous launch we spent 2 days hacking possibilities, not probabilities, and considering preferences over a set of possible futures might help or hinder attempts to encounter and exist in the world. The questions that guided the Futures of Learning hackathon were:
- What might be the futures of learning?
- What if mobile technologies were used as an expansive medium for creative problem-solving and social justice for the futures of learning?
- How might it spark new ideas for intercultural climate futures and drive systemic change in design education?
Embracing the Future of Learning through Speculative Design
What is Speculative Design? Speculative design, also known as critical design or design fiction, invites us to step back and reflect on the broader implications of our creations for living in Anthropogenic times. It is a practice that encourages us to ponder not just the functionality of design but also its impact on futures yet to be known. By focusing on possibilities through ‘What if…?’ and ‘What might be …?’ questions, speculative design challenges us to consider a myriad of potential futures and the role design plays in shaping time. As Jonathan Lukens and Carl Disalvo (2011) position, “the term speculative design does not refer to a specific movement or style. Rather, speculative design encompasses practices from across a range of disciplines, including visionary or futurist forms of architecture, design fiction, and—from within the field of interaction design—critical design or design for debate”
the term speculative design does not refer to a specific movement or style. Rather, speculative design encompasses practices from across a range of disciplines, including visionary or futurist forms of architecture, design fiction, and—from within the field of interaction design—critical design or design for debate
Jonathan Lukens & Carl Disalvo, 2011, p.25
The Project
We wanted to hack the futures of learning because learning – and education systems more broadly – have been notoriously hard to change, and, arguably haven’t kept up with the needs of today’s young people – if you listen to the sound exhibit at the back of the room you’ll hear one young person noting that during COVID they changed but schools didn’t. Here at SWSIP Lab, we purposely choose wicked, hard-to-solve and hard-to-grasp problems to speculate on together because, as hyper-objects, they can’t ever be fully known – which is why they are so hard to solve! In this project, designers from various backgrounds came together to tackle a ‘wicked problem’ in the middle of knowns and unknowns, working from the question, at what point did you think learning might need to change?
At what point did you think learning might need to change?
SWISP Lab locates big issues in personal stories by using the sentence stem “At what point …”
This complex, often unsolvable challenge—served as a catalyst for boundless creativity, critical and collective problem-solving through co-design of a currere. A currere is a paradigm shift in the way we think about educational experience, offering a relational method for knowing, being, becoming and doing.
The Research Exhibition
You may be wondering what a Research Exhibition is and how it is different to an exhibition you might go and see in an art gallery or museum? First, the exhibition is purposefully curated to feel like a working design studio. studioFive, the home of SWISP Lab, has been converted into a gallery and visitors are invited to walk through our thinking rather than read a research report. What you see on the walls around you are the data and research outputs from our project, The Futures of Learning. We choose to exhibit it in this way so as to return the research to the community that generated it and invite you all to enter into relation with data by badge-making, post-it noting and tagging our data with tour SWSIP Lab sticker sheets. This research exhibition was a celebration of youth participation, radical codesign and was a site for taking action through the co-creation for futures yet to become.
What are data and where do they come from?
The Futures of Learning data are a collection of artefacts and documentation from a 2 Day Hackathon that started at Science Gallery Melbourne and ended in studioFive. SWISP Lab locates hackathons at Science Gallery in the first instance because it positions them in an interdisciplinary space at the intersection of art and science. The Futures of Learning hackathon spent the first half day at the Dark Matters exhibition where we got our synapses firing. The CERN Tanglegrams were quite a drawcard and led us to do further Tanglegramming back at the studio when we were thinking with our “Artefacts from the Future”.
Co-designing a Toolkit
Part of the Futures of Learning project involved Designer-in-Residence, Jenn Thy, who responded to the data in collaboration with SWISP Lab to create the final toolkit – which is a culmination of collaborative efforts and a pedagogical instrument of shared wisdom and visionary thinking. Jenn is part of SWISP Lab’s program of radical residencies that support the co-design of a currere of self and community in the Anthropocene. A currere is like a curriculum but, unlike a curriculum, it is iterative, associative, contextual, responsive and relational. This presents educators with certain challenges, challenges that can become enabling constraints when educators have a speculative design toolkit to support their metho-pedagogy. Designed for adaptability, it is a versatile collection of tools, techniques, and methods, ready to be employed in diverse educational landscapes in and across Victorian schools. The toolkit has many elements, including a chatterbox that scaffolds “What if …?” thinking, provocation cards, and wondering wheel.
The Benefit
Through the integration of co-design and speculative design methodologies, this toolkit serves as a beacon, guiding design education communities toward play, speculation and wondering for equity, justice, activism and change. It elevates the perception and significance of contemporary design education, fostering a paradigm shift in pedagogical and methodological practices in harmony with community needs and new design approaches. Hosted on Padlet by the University of Melbourne, the toolkit’s artefacts are accessible both nationally and internationally, supporting a global dialogue on the future of learning. This digital platform ensures that the fruits of our collaborative labour are available to all, promoting social equity through participatory and cooperative methods.
The Invitation
SWISP Lab are on “a journey toward a profound consciousness of the relationality and interdependence of all that exists, which is in turn indispensable for imagining other possible worlds” (Escobar, 2020, p.5) and invite you to engage with this toolkit, to reimagine, play, and wonder. The futures of learning are unknown and known, and this complexity needs speculative and critical thought to encourage the flow of ideas that might change futures through changing now’s.
If you are a design educator in a Victorian school and would like to teach with the Speculative Design Toolkit, please contact us at swisp-lab@unimelb.edu.au
This project is made possible through the support of Creative Futures Ltd who established the Creative Futures Design Research and Education Fund at the University of Melbourne.