Together with Tobie Kerridge and Alex Wilkie from Goldsmiths, I am beginning to prepare for a very exciting track on Speculative Design that we are organizing at the 2010 European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, in Trento, Italy. The theme of the conference itself is Practicing Science and Technology, Performing the Social, and there are a number of excellent design related tracks. As the date for the conference gets closer, I’ll provide updates with links to the program and abstracts. For now, you can read the track description below.

Speculation, Design, Public and Participatory Technoscience: Possibilities and Critical Perspectives

Over the past decade there has been an increasing engagement between design and STS. One emerging and novel area of exchange is concerned with exploring the ways in which practices of ’speculative design’ and STS concerns of publics, participation, politics as well as expectations come together to inform one another, to critique one another, and to collaborate in developing new modes of co-production of contemporary technoscience. Although such associations are promising, they are nascent and in need of articulation and critical examination. Our proposed track is intended to provide the beginnings of such articulation and critical examination, by soliciting participation from STS scholars, design researchers and from practicing designers.

By speculative design we refer to a set of design practices and outcomes that are moving away from common notions of design as “problem-solving” or “styling”, towards framing design as a means for surfacing and materializing issues and contributing to the formation of publics and futures. In this move, design is increasingly cast as a possible mode of intervention into technoscience, thereby establishing renewed associations with STS. With speculative design the performativity of the object comes to the fore as a concern for both designers and theorists, as its objects and outcomes are often brought into being to, and interpreted as, materially and discursively enacting values, identities, agendas and beliefs. A challenge for STS then is to describe and characterize the performativity of the objects of speculative design in new ways that avoid recourse to the familiar positions and debates concerning ‘the political of artefacts’.’