Bespoke Booklets
Audrey Desjardins, Cayla Key, Heidi R. Biggs, Kelsey Aschenbeck · 2019
We present Bespoke Booklets: a design research method utilizing booklets of situated, imaginary, and personalized conceptual sketches to co-speculatively envision alternative futures (in our case for domestic Internet of Things). The Bespoke Booklets create a space where designers and participants can co-imagine alternative futures while also engaging each other at the level of embodied experiences. After refining our method, we discovered it had many qualities previously championed by feminist HCI and STS theorists. To this end, we draw out, analyze, and critique our method using feminist concepts as a lens to emphasize four specific qualities: collaborative, post-functional, situated, and partial. We found that the booklets, as material artifacts, were a productive tool to generate a physical record of our co-speculation and a fruitful catalyst for research that reflects feminist theory, offering an example of how it can be used as a heuristic for design methodologies.