Forget artefacts. Design speculative lifeworlds instead!

Today, more and more individuals, communities, and organizations recognize design practices as essential to the way they live and thus as an important vector for cultural debate and social change. In the last years, we have witnessed to the spreading of speculative and futures-oriented practices at the convergence of design and futures studies (mainly Speculative Design, Design Fiction and Experiential Futures) that can help practitioners to widen their design perspectives, and extend their toolbox for designing alternative futures beyond user-centered approach.

More recently a new approach has been introduced to underline how Speculative Design and Design Fiction can be used to more explicitly focus on and design the broader social, technical, and political worlds in which speculative artefacts exist. This approach uses the concept of <em>lifeworld</em> of speculative artefacts to go beyond immediate moments of use, and explore the different impacts of technologies as well as the maintenance and repair operations required to keep these artefacts working. Drawing from this perspective, the workshop aims at experimenting some design techniques to help practitioners and researchers design imaginaries for speculative artefacts.

By exploring speculative design and design fiction practices and moving from the centricity of the artefact to adopt the lenses of speculative lifeworlds, participants will learn to stretch their thinking and experiment a new approach to focus on rituals, politics, cultural and social conditions supporting speculative imaginaries.