Week 11 | Design for Longevity

 Speculative Future 

Discursive Design

“Design is everything, but everything is not design.

 

—Matt Owens (2024, p. 113

​

Overview
The longevity society (Scott, 2021) is transforming social infrastructure, including finance, education, healthcare, and community systems. How can the 12 Scenario Cards in the D4L Toolkit be used to envision possible future selves and futures? This week, we will explore and experiment with speculative design methods, including the Four-Fields Framework from Discursive Design (Tharp & Tharp, 2019) and the approaches presented in Speculative Everything (Dunne & Raby, 2025; 2013). 
 

Using the D4L Unlock Framework as a foundation, we will critically examine how speculative design can challenge the status quo, expand design possibilities, and generate alternative futures for individuals, communities, and urban systems in a longevity society

​

Reading Material

• Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2025). Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination. In MIT Press.

• Tharp, B. M., & Tharp, S. M. (2019). Discursive Design. In MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11192.001.0001

• Tharp, B. M., & Tharp, S. M. (2013). Discursive design basics: Mode and audience. In Nordes 2013: Experiments in Design Research (Vol. 5). https://archive.nordes.org/index.php/n13/article/view/326

• Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. In MIT Press.