Expanding Historical Approaches to Speculative Design
So-youn Jang, Jay David Bolter, Richmond Y. Wong, Heidi R. Biggs, Robert Soden, Vera D. Khovanskaya, Laura Forlano, Sasha de Koninck · 2025
This workshop expands historical approaches in HCI and design research, with a particular focus on speculative design.We aim to bring together researchers with diverse orientations and practices to open discussions about historicism and how historical approaches and methods can be applied to critical and speculative design, fostering reflexivity in design practice.Through hands-on activities, we will explore various approaches drawn from the humanities, social sciences, and design studies.The workshop activity topic will revolve around three themes that we believe can be productive for historicizing speculative design: rupture and continuity, figure-ground reversal, and the present as past or future.To that end, we will synthesize insights to develop a research agenda that identifies key topics and possible directions for expanding historical approaches to speculative design and outline a set of design strategies that integrate these theoretical concepts into practice.