 always concerned about how do we build products, right? We're always like, okay, what kind of stack do we use to build these things, what do people need, and all of that. We're in a hurry to constantly build products, but we're really not as concerned about what happens once you put these products out there in the real world, because technological products have real world social consequences. And when you talk about consequences, if you probably asked Mark Zuckerberg like 15 years ago, would Facebook be ever used for what? We'd probably be like, no, how could I even tell? And that's often a problem, because the future is really unknown. We don't know what's gonna happen, like we literally have no idea. So what does speculative design mean? How are you designing these futures when you have no idea of what's gonna happen? And this is potentially where speculative design kind of fits in. So to start off with, before we get into speculative design, I wanna give you a brief of what we normally do as traditional designers, design always is affirmative, which is we get client requirements, they want a product, and then we start building things for the client. Design is always about problem solving. It helps provide answers to complex questions, the nuances. Design basically kind of reinforces what the status quo today is. We see the world a certain way, and we are like, okay, we can make this to continue propagating the same idea. Last but not the least, the biggest thing, it helps us buy. Like how do you decide which product is better as opposed to another product? Design helps you make those choices. They're like, oh, this is a better design product. I'm gonna start using this. I'm gonna buy that. But when you look at speculative design, it's not really making products, but it's about being critical of what's out there today. It's about problem finding. The minute you kind of get deeper into topics and start understanding how products are playing out in terms of a social, political spectrum, you start uncovering more and more nuances about how these things play out in the real world. You start asking more and more questions. Once you get into the rabbit hole, you can't get out. You constantly see a lot more problems than what you started off with. And because speculative design is, you are essentially trying to create a future. You aren't held back by the bounds of what is possible today. It's basically if I were to give you an opportunity to make Star Trek, you would probably do it in whatever way you want it to. If I ask each and everyone in this room what a future could look like. Everyone's future of their own cities or whatever is extremely different. And it helps us think. It helps us, because you're critically looking at all of these nuances, it makes us question certain obvious things. We all take capitalism for granted. But if you actually look at it, this is a system that existed for about 150 years. That's barely nothing when you look at humans have existed for probably 40,000 years. So this is a really new system. So it kind of makes a question a lot of things that we take for granted today. So when you're talking about speculative design, the common criticism that is going on about speculative design that's both in the West is the fact that speculative design is still done by designers. If we were to imagine, say if all of us were to imagine what Hyderabad would look like in 2050 or a product for a company, the way we designers sitting in this room would think about it versus people of Hyderabad who have lived the history of Hyderabad, who are currently living in Hyderabad, how they would imagine something for Hyderabad would be entirely different, right? So that brings us to the question that are we really the experts here? Who are the experts? And if designers are not experts, sure, in some contexts, we do work in with our design knowledge and make really fascinating products that we're surrounded with. But in context that we don't know enough about, what do we do as designers? And there's also this notion of, because you're always doing it in a problem solution approach, you need those experts, right? Because how do people come up with solutions and how you have all these techniques to come up with ideas and everything? So you end up needing an expert, but what if we are not the experts because we don't understand context? These are very different. For me, living in Bangalore, going to some place in Bihar is extremely unusual. I have no idea what's going on there. So then what is it as designers that we can actually do? How do you, what does design even mean then? So for us, we look at design as being facilitators, right? We have certain tools. We look at certain problems in a specific way. We follow a process. And, but the same process could be applied by anybody. For example, if, let's say, Thanos were to wipe out all the designers on the planet today, right? It does not mean people stop solving problems. People still have problems. People are still gonna solve and find really creative solutions to their own issues, which probably works way better than what we try to do for them, right? And so we try to look at how, how do you enable people to do design? So for the next few slides, I'm going to talk about a project that we did in Rural Bihar. I don't know if you can see, but this is Bhoutijari Heart. It's a small village in the eastern end of Bihar. The demographics of this place is really interesting because it shares its border with Bangladesh, Nepal, and West Bengal. So you have people speaking a number of languages over there. The project that we did was in collaboration with Project Potential, and we went into the context to understand more about people's perception about early childhood education and care. Early childhood is anything between zero to six. We went in to understand the practices that exist and people's perception around it. So it was a research project that we did. And since we were, and since we were working with early childhood education and care, we obviously picked mothers as stakeholders. So basically, because we picked mothers as stakeholders, I had no role in the research and you'll probably know why soon enough. Yeah, that was because I think automatically the men of our team weren't able to be a part of the research for two reasons. One is that women weren't comfortable, the rural women weren't comfortable talking to strange men. And secondly, when have men really ever understood problems from a women's perspective really well? So, but all jokes aside, they played a very important role of distracting everybody else in the community from interrupting the research that we had with the women there. Now, what Arjun said about designers as enablers, facilitating design or facilitating participation is most easily implemented in places where three factors exist. One is where the participants that you're working with have skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and creativity. So our education system puts enough value on it. The second is where equal power relations exist irrespective of class, class and occupation. This could exist between the participants or between designers and non-designers. And the third being that there's an effective communication between the two parties, whether it be a common language or a common cultural understanding. Now, let me quickly give you a snippet of our participant group. This is Rita Devi. She is married, she lives in Bihar. She has two children, elder girl, three-year-old, younger girl, eight months. She quit her education in sixth grade to help out in family matters. She was married by the time she was 13 and the reality of her life today is such that her mother-in-law wouldn't let her leave the house premises without her husband even if she were to access healthcare. And within the joint family structure, Rita has really low agency, she doesn't have a say in matters such as, bigger matters such as when do her children get married but even smaller day-to-day things like what goes into the nutrition of her child. So, she is told what to cook and she cooks it. Now, with such a group that we were trying to research with, the three factors that I mentioned before, they all strike out, right? Skills are just critical thinking, she gave up education, she has the least agency, et cetera. So, enabling speculation in such a context where we go in as enablers, enabling speculation in such a context is not as easy as going into the community and engaging conversation about possible futures, but it's more about as designers, how do you design the research and how do you design the artifacts such that you let them imagine futures. Their immediate needs are probably food, water, sanitation, but how do you build that capacity to expire and make them think beyond just their immediate needs? What do they want for themselves and what do they need for their children and what is best for the community? And that's where our role came in. So, coming to our process, we had a five-day workshop with the mothers and we hoped that at the end of it, we were able to get the women to critically reflect on the current existing problems that they have and question some norms and sort of devise better ways to move forward. Before the workshop, let's forget this, but before the workshop, we spent a couple of days settling into the context, trying to understand what is like a basic understanding. And it's during this time that we quickly realized that traditional research methods such as focus group discussions sort of didn't work so well because the community was very used to giving socially correct answers. They have had enough instances where NGOs and government officials have gone there for surveys and they just know what to tell you when you facilitate these discussions with them. So we needed to come up with a creative way of engaging the women in an activity so that we could understand, we could get a deeper understanding of their context and they could also think back about their situation. It was during this time that we had noticed that Ludo and Snake and Ladders were very popular with the children in the group, in the village. Another thing that we had noticed was that Nukar Nataka street play was very common over there and it was a way for villagers to tell other villagers about social evils. So we wondered, hey, why not use these methods in our research and because it's something that they're comfortable with and they know about it, so how can we use them in our research? And that was a five day workshop that we did with them. So over a period of five days we used games and theaters as research tools. So day one was just about settling into a context. It's extremely important to build trust with your participants because you are going there as you're a foreign body in their environment so that trust, you know, why are you here? What are you gonna get out of this? And when do we re-benefits from this and what do we have in engaging in participation with you? So we did a couple of activities that sort of where the villagers could teach us their ways of living. So we cooked on the Chula with them, we learned some Bihari songs. So first day was just about trust building. Second day was about redesigning the game. So we took Snake and Ladders and we redesigned it. I hope all of you know the rules of Snake and Ladders. It's pretty easy, right? Like you just roll the dice, whatever number comes, you move the pawn according to the number. If you, by chance, end up on a Snake or a Ladder, you go up the Ladder or the Snake Bats when you come down. What we did though was we modified the game in such a way that both Snake and Ladder fall in the same box and the box has a situation that we noticed in the environment. What the participant was expected to do was if they came on those box, if they upon reached on the box that were modeled as children, the player had to decide whether the situation was a Snake for the child or the Ladder. So we used them as metaphors. So was it a Deterrent for the child or was it a Promoter? If the mothers decided that it was a Deterrent for the child, it was a Snake, they had a chance to turn it into a Promoter, a chance to turn into a Ladder, but they had to devise a way of moving forward and the rest of the team had to agree with it. So this way, we were trying to get them to critically reflect on their realities. And also you're kind of trying to promote them to break out of their existing structures and think of their futures because if you ask what a future for their child is, their immediate response is, hey, my child needs to make money, go to the city, earn, come back. But that's not really a sustainable future because you know what happens to those people when they come to cities like Bangalore and all of that. So how do you get them to break beyond these traditional notions of what they want from the future into really understanding what it is in the future that they're looking at? So we played the game in three settings. One was a private home of a couple. The other one was an Angan with about 10 women, which was also a private setting. And the third one was in front of a temple, I believe. Yeah, a temple. Yeah, with about 30 players. Of course, the setting and the kind of privacy that it gave also affected the responses that women gave us. What we realized was in a private setting, women were more comfortable giving honest answers. The game that we had played, the reason why it was a successful attempt was because the game that we had played created a sort of a magic circle, like a play area where women could live an alternate world, live a world that was detached from the existing realities that they live in. So the counter-strike that we play or the PUBG, it's an alternate world, right? It's not real, but in that moment, within that boundary, it's pretty real. So that helped them think about possible futures that were not so tied down to their social problems that they're webbed in. The idea of justifying whether the mentioned situation was a snake or a ladder was critical in getting them to reflect on their situation and actually understand the practices that were not working for them. Gamifying the research also, so where women could change the snake into a ladder really helped because now in the game, they gave us solutions or they brought ideas from there and about what would be a better way to move forward and the fact that everybody had to agree brought about a lot of debate and discussion amongst the women. And if a woman said that I would educate my girl child till 25, then there were people who were arguing against it saying, hey, that's not possible. And so it gave us a deeper understanding but also told them about what goes on. Yes, I'll, yes, next. Furthermore, the rules of the game helped in facilitating the power imbalances that existed within the group. So there was a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law and usually when the mother-in-law speaks, the daughter-in-law keeps quiet because our structures are like that. So, but here, because people can't speak out of a chance, it really helped us in facilitating that power that existed in the group. And finally, for the other villagers in the group, for the other villagers in the surrounding, there seemed like a very harmless activity. It was just people playing snake in ladders and that way, I don't think we had enough people interrupting us. Because constantly, every time during our interviews in the first few days, the women would go off into a separate room. But the men are constantly like, what's happening in that room, right? Like, and they're like, oh, I want to know. I want to go in there. The mother-in-law is constantly interrupting. So, but then when this game happened, it was like, oh, all the women are playing. So the setting was basically all the women are playing. You saw the photos, right? And so on the outer periphery, all the men are standing. Like, all the men are standing and wondering what the hell is going on. And I'm there kind of like trying to talk to all these people and saying, okay, like, you know, don't enter. Like, I mean, I didn't tell that to them directly, but it's more like, you know, just making sure that they don't enter interrupt what's going on. And it was like an evening in the village, nobody has anything to do, they're chilling. So it was a good phase. We'll get into a few examples and throw light on the conversations that happened over there. I don't think you can really see what's written over there, but I'll read it out. So one of the situations that were mentioned over there were kam umrameh, shadi aur bache, which means early marriage and early pregnancy, which was a rampant practice in the community. And when one of the participants reached that box with her girl, Paan, over there, she said that, she identified the custom as a deterrent for the child. And she said that, you know, I will take up enough loan to, I had to turn it into a ladder. She said, I will be the change and I will take up enough loan to educate my girl child and be the change for the community. And, but then what was interesting for us and what was really a win for us was when the participants started debating with her, saying that, you know, your child would probably lose her glow at the age of 18 or you'll have to pay dowry for her to get married because she's now, she probably won't find a suitable guy for her. Somebody said that if you were to educate her till 22 or 21, then what does she do? She comes back and she works in a plantation farm. That's a plantation farm. So she comes back and works in a plantation farm just like you. So then we really saw how there were other reasons why, you know, these practices still exist in the community. And that sort of a debate really helped us in facilitating more provocative arguments with them about something like this. Another example, if I were to give, there was somewhere down there, there's parivaar mein 3 se adhik bachhe family planning, more than three children in a family. And the other example was bachon ka utshikshah prap karna, children getting educated properly. One of the participants reached parivaar mein 3 se adhik bachhe and she said that was a ladder for her family because, because why the more hands in the family and that's how their perception is that more hands, more income and that way things move forward. And then when she reached bachon ka utshikshah prap karna, the rest of them said, hey, if your girl child has other siblings, say five siblings beneath her, she's gonna quit education like all of us and she's gonna take care of them. She's gonna get married early. She's gonna go through the entire cycle that we went through. And that's why family planning is important. So even for the participants, it was the first time that they made those random connections, which we have quotes from them saying that it was not something that they realized earlier because that sort of conversation doesn't happen in their environment. On day four, we co-scripted a play with the community where based on the conversations that happened on day three, we wrote a play and the idea was to give back the research that we did to the other people of the society. We didn't want it to stay within those worlds. We wanted other people to also know what we had spoken about. So we used play as a method of giving voice to the women. Ideally, we would have liked women to be a part of our play, but there was fear in them. They were scared of the consequences of what would happen to them after the play was over because they had radical thoughts. And so one of the things that actually happened during our session was, so we finished the session, we write the play together and all the women have gathered in a single house. And as we finished the session, I'm walking out with one of the ladies and I'm like, I just look back, I don't know what's in front of me and I'm like, hey, so how did you like the session? And then she's like, what, what are you talking about? And then I'm like, I don't get this because for the last three hours she's been with us. The last three days she's been with us. And then suddenly I look back and then she's kind of making these weird facial expressions and I look back and it's her husband. And so she had to completely deny the fact that she had to play any part in this. And even while writing the play, it's a normal Indian village, right? Like, and so there is houses. There's one house that had like two or three floors and there's somebody on the terrace of that house and her reaction, and there was two guys there on the terrace, right? Really far. No chance that they could hear what's going on. Probably seeing and wondering what's happening. That's about it. And her reaction immediately changed. She's like, no, I'm not doing anything. I'm like, I'm going into the room, right? Like, and so that fear exists and it can't really speak out. And this is the kind of community that we're talking about. So what we sort of worked out in the end was that the women coached us on how to go about the play, the little nuances of their language and we went to the community and then our group, we played it out of the community in front of 400 onlookers and we sort of staged what the women felt about the community and the problems. We have a small snippet from the rehearsal that was happening there. The reactions that could actually take place because they've never had these conversations. They've never had the opportunity to come and say, no, we don't like what's going on in our houses because all that happens is the men, and in Bihar, by the way, alcohol is illegal and most of the men are alcoholics, right? Because they get illegal liquor. They're drunk by 12 and the women have to go through a lot and then they're oppressed. Even further, they can't speak out. It's, yeah, it's terrible. And that was pretty much our experience that happened in Bihar. But so this was our understanding of what speculative design could be when you're looking at it from the ground up because there are other people in the world doing speculative design. I think Dan and Rebi are some of the pioneers of this field and one of the complaints that often happen with their work is that this is too museum-y or it's too artifacts that are made by designers, kept in a place and then other people go who have the access to go to these museums and say, okay, oh, this is, whatever, right? And so there are some examples. So one of the things is this one's called, by this company called Super Flux in London. So they reimagined what London would look like in 2050 where basically the earth has been hit by a massive climate change and the city of London has drastically changed. So they did some, one of the interesting things that they did was they did something called fogponics to grow plants that you could eat because obviously all the crops have died out and so how do you deal with that? So there are places inside each household that helps you grow these weird things and it was actually a prototype that they built, right? The other thing is this one's a solar kitchen restaurant which is basically like this installation of sorts, but this restaurant is only open on days when there is available sunlight, but so the other, so if you, let's say you make a business plan to go to a restaurant like this, you have to check the weather like 15 minutes before you get there to know if the restaurant is even going to be open. So that kind of opens up very interesting conversations. These are not products like you would never start a restaurant at a solar kitchen restaurant, but it opens up very interesting conversations about our daily obvious behaviors, right? The most well-known probably design fiction or speculative design is probably black mirror like we all know, right? This is, so this is idea of like, you know, tech is gonna create a great beautiful world out there and then when black mirror came out is when we actually started kind of looking back and saying, okay, this feels too real. So this is idea of creating this make-believe, right? So it's not too far out where it's like, this is no way, this is not gonna happen. And so how do you make these artifacts that are very believable and like to a point, but also like, you start to question certain assumptions. So you kind of find that balance between on how you do these things. Then there's, so again, so I'd like to conclude the talk by saying speculative design is not something that's brand new. Like companies have been doing this. People like Microsoft Corning Glass has anyone here seen the Microsoft Future's video? Like is this all white thing with white men working on like touching fridges and whatever and like all these fancy stuff, right? Or the Corning Glass video where they basically re-imagined the entire world to be of glass. So everything around you is a touchscreen basically. So all these walls become touchscreen. But the thing is like, these are not realistic futures. These are very utopian and we need to start questioning who do these futures really benefit and who is suffering for these futures to happen. Like the future is not according to what Microsoft believes it to be. Our lives are way more complex. We are we are webbed in this really complex like social structures, like political structures. And you can't just take out and say, oh, tech is gonna solve everything. And so that's what I'd like to leave you with. Thank you. Thank you.