Speculative Kit
Technology Imagination with Makers
We constructed a Speculative Kit to respond to the following design questions:
1. How might we conceptualize the technologies developed in the research center into playable/playful forms of speculative objects?
2. How might we use these speculative objects in the process of DIY and making to imagine possible futures for a specific practice? We focused our discussion on the form and usage of the kit by leveraging the background knowledge of design fiction and situated co-speculation as follows.
Workshop
The Speculative Kit workshop aimed to conceptualize the technologies developed by the research center into the forms of fictional shopping catalogs and tangible props. We recruited eight designers, with interaction, industrial, or commercial design backgrounds, from personal networks. They were grouped into four groups of two. Each group chose one technology to generate a series of fictional products, which could be practical or provocative.
We chose the lo-fi and unfinalized rendering effect of the products to leave room for readers' self interpretations. The original descriptions of the fictional products were in Traditional Chinese for the local makers. Here we summarize the four series of products, named SKEYE, DOG’S EYE, SUNFOLLOW, and DOGGY SPOT.
In addition to the graphic and textual information, we deliberately emphasized the tangibility of physical props to elicit bodily explorations. The fictional props dropped concrete anchors for alternative possibilities that could go beyond the conceptualized technologies through embodied explorations. The fictional props were 3D printed in the same color scheme and similar sizes for the flexibility of reassembly among different series of the products.
Credit
Project Advisor | Wenn-Chieh Tsai, Rung-Huei Liang
Designer | David Chung, MengChi Liu, Bowen Kong, Chun-Cheng Huang
Photographer | MengChi Liu
