Futures Lenses. Co-speculating Things with AI — Workshop
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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 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.
Key concept: Imagination through AI unexpectedness
Methodically, the workshop was tailored to playfully support imagination through the engagement with speculative scenarios and the co-creation of fictional designs in collaboration with large language models and image generators. Rather than creating broad, abstract future images, we focused on the design of everyday objects as a basis. We used a hands-on, iterative approach, combining strategies from critical design practice—like anti-solutionism, irony, and absurdity—with low-fidelity prototyping and simple, no-code AI tools such as a simple text-to-image generator, Transferscope or the Futures Lens, which were developed at the AI+D Lab based on Stable Diffusion.
The main idea was to deliberately apply constraints, ambiguity, or exaggeration through prompting, as a strategy to provoke misunderstandings, errors, hallucinations, and unexpected results in the outcoming AI-generated images. The Futures Lens, for example, defamiliarizes the elements of an input image based on a text prompt, as seen below.
Students had then to analyze the output images, find “accidents” and weird elements, and interpret and make sense of them as a source of critical and creative thinking. Through multiple iterations, they helped students defamiliarize everyday objects, expose paradoxes and biases, and get inspiration for new design ideas and principles.
Catalogues of Fantastic Things
As a result of this collaborative process with AI, each student group designed a “Catalogue of Fantastic Things” as a design fiction artifact. Each catalog visualizes diverse fictional concepts and reflects on different alternative futures through their everyday objects.
Towards playful ways of engaging with AI
The workshop took a hands-on approach with a focus on practical and conceptual engagement with the technology rather than theoretical deep dives. It aimed to provide design students with hands-on, playful ways of working with generative AI for ideation, co-creation and co-speculation, focusing on critical prompting and the role of the unexpected in design processes through artificial intelligence for fostering creative friction.
