A New Type of Design Education; Models, Materials and Futures

This article looks at how our educational cultures define, frame and support speculation. Over the last two decades, speculative design has become synonymous with a particular sub-sect of experimental design practice, by turning our attention to the interrelationship between speculation, the imagination and our disciplinary histories we can begin to rethink our collective pedagogic trajectory. The aim of this chapter is to problematise the idea of speculation in relationship to cultures and communities that support the development of our disciplinary imagination.

Disciplinary boundaries have been erected, maintained and policed through educational and professional cultures; these pedagogic histories settle on certain ‘disciplinary truths’; methods, processes, aesthetics and ethics that give birth to a particular imaginary. These disciplinary imaginaries, created by historically problematic legacies, have an 'intolerance to difference, to the unthought, to its outside' . To go beyond our current pedagogic framing, we must radically rethink the role of speculation as a new narrative trajectory outside of market-driven futures.