Futures Lenses. Co-speculating Things with AI

The way we imagine possible futures are diverse and shaped by different perspectives and worldviews. Each offers its own possibilities and influences how we design things. The workshop Futures Lenses — Co-speculating Things with AI, developed and held by Jordi Tost, aimed to explore the potential of looking into different speculative futures through the lens of AI as a design method, using generative AI as a co-designer and critical counterpart for ideation.

The workshop was held over five days at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd as part of the Lab Week in autumn 2024. It was part of the joint research project KITeGG and involved students from HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd and HS Mainz.

The workshop took a deliberately hands-on, playful approach to support imagination through the engagement with speculative scenarios and the co-creation of fictional designs in collaboration with large language models and image generators. Instead of creating broad, abstract future images, participants focused on redefining everyday objects as entry points into imagining alternative worlds and unconventional design possibilities. Yet, accessing perspectives beyond our own habitual ways of thinking remains a challenge. What if the very “failures” of AI—its hallucinations and misunderstandings—could be deliberately provoked to foster imagination?

Creative Friction through AI Hallucination

The core methodological approach was counterintuitive: rather than seeking controlled AI outputs from previously defined concepts, the main idea was to deliberately apply constraints, ambiguity, or exaggeration through prompts, as a strategy to provoke misunderstandings, glitches, hallucinations, and unexpected results in the outcoming AI-generated images—what we might call “creative accidents.”

This iterative process combined strategies from critical design practice—anti-solutionism, irony, and absurdity—with low-fidelity prototyping, and simple, no-code AI tools. These tools included simple text-to-image generators, Transferscope, and the Futures Lens—a custom tool developed at the AI+D Lab for the workshop format based on Stable Diffusion. For example, the Futures Lens transforms input images based on text prompts.

Futures Lenses Workflow

In this process, the model hallucinates details, changing or removing elements of the input image, or adding new ones. By using different prompts, one can reinterpret and defamiliarize the same image or object in multiple ways, opening diverse possibilities for ideation and imagination.

Futures Lenses concept: an input image of a tea pot (left) gets transformed based on the prompts “Cyberpunk” and “Toy land” (right)

Futures as Constraints

Students, who worked in groups, were assigned an unconventional future as a main constraint—such as “calm,” “inefficient,” “selfish,” or “spooky”—and were challenged to make sense of these futures, no matter how uncanny, by reflecting on everyday objects and their interactions. Following this strategy in a “quantity-over-quality” approach, students transformed input images and analyzed the outcomes, interpreting strange elements and visual glitches as sources of critical and creative thinking. Through multiple iterations, students defamiliarized everyday objects, exposed paradoxes and biases embedded in AI systems, and discovered new design principles and possibilities.

Catalogues of Fantastic Things

As a result of the workshop, each student group produced a “Catalogue of Fantastic Things”—a design fiction artifact that serves as both documentation and speculation. Each catalogue visualizes diverse fictional concepts and reflects on alternative futures through their everyday objects. They do not aim to function as product proposals but as provocations, inviting us to question our assumptions about efficiency, innovation, solutionism and the purpose of design itself.

Calm Future

Anja Gutmann, Lea Haferbier, Carolin Kaltwasser

Welcome to the calm future. In this world, it is important to embrace presence and nurture well-being. Of course, we have to deal with the paradox of technology: how to create tools that promote slowness in a fast-paced world. Luckily, we discovered the principle of intentional slowness—designing objects that encourage mindfulness rather than speed.

This project explores a world where homes become living, breathing entities that rely on our care and attention, and where products serve not only functional needs but also promote well-being and happiness. Technology in this future moves beyond efficiency and productivity to cultivate emotional intelligence and empathy.

The catalogue “Calm Design: Future Objects for a Quiet World” showcases a curated selection of objects that reimagine relationships with time, daily routines, and self-care. The Mindful Alarm, a clock that only rings if you tend to its plant—water it, give it light, and it will gently wake you each morning. The Calmness Backpack serves as a minimalist carrier with soft, natural textures and hidden pockets for mindfulness tools, symbolizing tranquility you can keep close. Objects that remind us to take care of ourselves, inviting us to move in calm and stay in quiet, where time unfolds in a softer way through steady steps in a peaceful place.

Calm Design: Future Objects for a Quiet World Calm Design — Future Objects for a Quiet World

Inefficient Future

Cosima Rieger, Jonas Wienberg, Tim Bluthardt

Welcome to the inefficient future. In this world, it is important to embrace imperfection and take time for things that truly matter. Of course, we have to deal with the paradox of efficiency and instant gratification that modern society pushes on us. Luckily, we discovered a design principle based on purposeful slowness and mindful imperfection.

Presented as an “Instruction Manual for an Inefficient Future,” the project takes the form of a LEGO guide created in fictional cooperation with LEGO and Dieter Rams. It features gadgets that celebrate the art of waiting, the beauty of error, and the charm of manual labor—devices that deliberately take longer to process simple tasks.

The work steps outside efficiency-driven norms of everyday life, consciously practicing inefficiency as a design choice to challenge the meritocratic push for streamlined results. Like building with LEGO, it invites us to assemble ideas for a future where slowing down, playing, and questioning purpose become essential building blocks, bringing richness to design through complexity.

Instruction Manual for an Inefficient Future

Selfish Future

Georgia Ioannidou, María José Merino Zapata, Lucía Navarro Bloise

Welcome to the selfish future. In this world, it is important to prioritize individualism and personal satisfaction above the needs of others. Of course, we have to deal with the necessity of sharing spaces and resources, but we strive to avoid this as much as possible to prevent tolerating others and internal conflicts. Luckily, we discovered the principle of personalized separation, allowing each person to maintain their autonomy even in shared environments.

The project manifests as commercial brochures featuring products designed for power individualism: a multi-compartment pot ideal for shared flats where no one has to cook together, a dual-spout teapot to host guests without compromising your tastes, and a single-seating table for dining solo. This darkly satirical work exposes contemporary trends toward hyper-personalization while raising provocative questions about isolation, community, and social connection in an age of extreme individualism.

"Selfish Future" product brochures Selfish Future” product brochures

Spooky Future

Joshua Quere, Yannick Schwab

Welcome to the spooky future. In a world driven by hyper-efficiency, we risk losing the sense of presence and mystery that once made life meaningful. Our surroundings have become flaw- less and automated, but this perfection comes at the expense of something deeper—our connection to the world around us. To reclaim this, we embrace design that intentionally introduces subtle discomfort, slo- wing down our experiences and prompting reflec- tion. By incorporating purposeful flaws, our spaces and objects encourage us to pause and engage more meaningfully with each moment. The catalogue “Modern Living” features devices that subtly disrupt instant gratification, reminding us to reconnect with our surroundings and ourselves. Embrace the quiet unease—it is within the unknown that we truly rediscover life.

"Modern Living" catalogue “Modern Living” catalogue

Towards playful ways of engaging with AI

Rather than offering theoretical deep dives or technical training, the workshop focused on supporting practical, conceptual and critical engagement with generative AI, providing design students with hands-on, playful ways of working with the technology for ideation, co-creation and co-speculation.

By focusing on critical prompting and embracing the unexpected, students discovered how AI hallucination, typically viewed as a technical problem to be solved, can be reframed as a creative and critical AI + Design strategy. Generative AI, when used speculatively and critically as a disruptive counterpart, serves a dual function: it can help us expose embedded biases and assumptions in both the technology and our own thinking, unravel stereotypes, defamiliarize the familiar and discover unexpected possibilities for design that might not emerge through conventional ideation.

The workshop suggests that engaging critically with AI does not have to be abstract—it can begin with the concrete, the playful, and the everyday: one object at a time.

Futures Lenses. Co-speculating Things with AI

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