The Double Diamond of Speculative Design
A guide to the emerging process of Speculative Design
Reading Time: 15 minutes
A Map to Explore the Territory of Speculative Design
The Double Diamond is, probably, the most successful model of the Design Process. Initially, it was meant to communicate the designer's job to non-designers. In time, it became a useful map for design practitioners and educators to orient themselves and their students along with projects (if you've never heard about it, you can learn more in this earlier post).
In this article, you can learn how to use the Double Diamond to orientate yourself in the territory of Speculative Design.
Of course, the map is not the territory, and the Double Diamond can't really represent all the twisted trajectories of the design process - whether it is traditional or speculative - yet, it can help in not getting lost in the exploration.
What is the Double Diamond?
The Double Diamond Design Process definition in 150 words:
The Double Diamond describes what happens when a design team starts to work on a brief.
The first diamond represents the problem space.
The first diamond is made of a divergent step of Discovery, in which the team collects information through primary and secondary research. Following there is a converging step of Definition, where this info is synthesized in artifacts such as Research Insights, Personas, Journeys, Empathy Maps, etc.
The result is a deep understanding of the problem that designers are called to address, often framed as a How Might We question.
The second diamond represents the solution space.
It starts again with a divergent step of Development, or concept generation, where the team proposes and discusses many possible solutions to the HMW question. Following is a convergent Delivery phase where the most promising ones are prototyped, tested, and refined.
At the end of the process, the team delivers a robust solution backed up by research insights and design iterations.
What is Speculative Design?
Speculative Design definition in 150 words:
If Design is meant to provide solutions to problems, Speculative Design has been defined as a problem-finding activity. Its scope is to explore the overlooked consequences that the technological development of our times will have on the human experience and the global ecosystem, using design as a medium of investigation. Speculative Design wants to increase our awareness and intentionality on how we direct our evolution, suggesting alternative interpretations of the present and tracing new possible routes for our future.
Future itself plays a central role: traveling forward in time is the most used strategy in Speculative Design to land in a space free from the boundaries of our current world and design for what is possible rather than for what it is. Yet, as we said, future is only a strategy: what Speculative Design wants to explore is alternatives, more than futures - the future is just an easy place where we can accept alternatives to be situated. Setting the design process free from the configuration of the world as we know it let us confront how another world may look like, check how we like it, and consider what we may do in the present to move towards or away from it.
But before we get confused, let's take out our map to orientate ourselves in the process through which the Speculative Design process is performed.
What is the process of Speculative Design?
Let’s use the Double Diamond to form a process for speculative design. Of course, this isn’t the only possible process, but it’s a good start.
Like in the classic Double Diamond, the first diamond of Speculative Design is dedicated to collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing information.
Commercial-oriented (aka traditional) design focuses on the discovery of the user's needs and problem framing. Speculative Design wants to detect the different ways in which the technological, environmental, economic, or political context of today may change in the future, leading to a world other than the one we know.
Step 1 of Speculative Design: Discovery
In the divergent phase of the first diamond, you will look for the weak signals of change emerging in the present.
You'll research, interview experts, or read about groundbreaking novelties that could pivot our future towards radically different presents like emerging technologies, social experiments, new scientific theories, and revolutionary startups. This phase is called signal scanning and provides inspiration for imagining the possible direction of our evolution.
Some of these signals may disappear in time. Others may morph in unexpected ways, but the scope here is not to predict the future. Rather, imagine one future, one alternative, and signals help you create these alternative visions.
Step 2 of Speculative Design: Define
In the convergent phase of the first diamond, you will synthesize signals into one specific scenario among the many possible.
To do so, you will select, combine and expand the signals collected in the previous phase to give a contour to a speculated future world. This happens by imagining how some signals of change that seem relevant or interesting may evolve in a given time frame. What could be the consequences on the economy, on society, or on the environment if these practices, which today are marginal, would become easily accessible and massively adopted tomorrow? The result of this synthesis is the definition of a possible future scenario.
We can see a scenario as a How Might Be statement that expresses a possible evolution of our present in one sentence. From here, the problems and criticality behind its emergence are explored in the following diamond.
Like in the classic Double Diamond, the second diamond of Speculative Design is dedicated to the design of solutions.
However, we don't have a How Might We question to look answers for - instead, we have a How Might Be statement of a hypothetical world where these solutions would exist. Let's remember that Speculative Design is a problem-finding practice. Design Solutions from this other world speak about the problems that its inhabitants face in their lives.
Step 3 of Speculative Design: Develop
In the divergent phase of the second diamond, the Speculative Designers will start to imagine life in the How Might Be scenario.
What does it mean to live in such a world? Which products and services would people use? In this step, they generate concepts for hypothetical designs that narrate specific aspects of the scenario. Designers are free to imagine user cases and stories and stretch reality to the limits of the possible, where technologies unavailable today may be part of our daily life, be embedded in our homes, bodies, or orbiting around our planet.
Each concept is an entry point for the speculative world and enriches the description of it. The design concepts imagined are solutions to problems present in the specific scenario you're considering and provide interesting points of view on the life in the scenario to be further explored in the next step.
Step 4 of Speculative Design: Delivery
In the convergent phase of the second diamond, you will prototype the most interesting design concepts from this future world.
These materialized designs are called diegetic prototypes, or design fictions, representing fictional designed elements from the speculated world. The scope of design fiction is to enact the experience of living in the scenario and suspend the disbelief about the possibility of its (future) emergence. Physical products, advertisement material, service touch-points, instruction manuals, newspaper headlines, or insurance contracts are all design fiction examples that help narrate and reflect on the critical aspects of the imagined world.
In the act of producing and interacting with the design fiction, we get the chance to ask: what problem is this the solution for? What we're doing is retro-engineering the discovery of hypothetical future problems through the design of hypothetical future solutions.
The Scenario Space and the Artifact Space
Let's make a summary of the Double Diamond of Speculative Design:
The first diamond represents the scenario space.
It is made of a divergent step of Signal Scanning, in which the traces of emerging futures in the present are collected through primary and secondary research. Following, there is a converging step of Scenario Definition, where this info is synthesized in a scenario describing a possible, alternative socio-technical configuration of the future.
The outcome is a sensitization on many different futures unevenly emerging in our present, and the tuning into one specific world among the many possible, framed as a How Might Be statement.
The second diamond represents the artifact space.
It starts with a divergent step of Scenario Evocation, or speculative concept generation, where many potential fictional design objects from the HMB world are proposed and discussed. Following, there is a convergent phase of Diegetic Prototyping, where you prototype, experience, and discuss the most interesting ones.
The outcome is a stretch in the perception of what futures are possible, inspired by the emerging signals of change and empowered by the interaction with designed fragments from a specific, alternative, future reality.
The Power of Imagining Alternative Futures
We can say that the Speculative Design process is, overall, a journey of discovery. Design is used as a generative medium of future-oriented insights that may reveal dystopic fears, utopian hopes, or trivial elements of tomorrow. The Speculative Designer (you, for instance) navigates through the two speculative diamonds hunting for traces of the future, imagining its evolution, and producing and experiencing pieces of it. All of this is done from a very specific point of view: a person of the present. No surprise if the critical aspects emerge from the speculated future, but look much more contemporary than expected. And that's precisely the point: engaging in fictional time-travel into parallel worlds expands our awareness of how the future is, after all, a consequence of the present.
Further, the lack of boundaries granted by the speculative context let us realize that the future may be radically different than today - how different will depend on our collective choices and actions today. As designers, we can play a leading role in shaping the flavor of our future. Engaging in speculative moments of reflection on the many different futures that we may be heading towards can make us more intentional on how we design the evolution of our evolution, and shed new light on what Design can do, and on what Design should do, really.
In Conclusion
We briefly described the Speculative Design process - but, truly, more than a process, Speculative Design is a practice. It trains the mind to imagine alternative future realities and to accept their potential existence through the experience of fictional design artifacts.
To make a genuinely desirable future our future reality, the first crucial step is to build the belief that many different futures are actually possible. The next step is to accept the agency that we have through our present choices in shaping our future evolution and use this agency to intentionally work towards the future we hope to see realized.
John C. Lily, a truly speculative scientist, said:
I invite you to engage in a limitless exploration of what futures may hold.
As a result, you could, literally, change the world.
Learning Resources on Speculative Design
Read more about the Double Diamond: What is the Double Diamond Design Process?
Self-explanatory: The Young Designer’s Guide to Speculative and Critical Design
A bit of context: An Overview of Contemporary Speculative Practice
A practical overview: Speculative Design in the Real World
Find a Speculative Design community in your city: Speculative Futures Chapters
How to nicely invest 54 minutes: Design is Messy
