Speculating on the future
I sometimes wonder whether we’re too anchored in the rear-view mirror.
We ask questions framed for yesterday’s world, when what we need is to notice what might emerge in tomorrow’s.
Indicators tell us where we’ve been. Polling tells us what people were ready to consume. But lived experience tells us how people are already navigating the present — and that is where futures start to form.
We’ve learnt this the hard way.
When the pandemic hit, it wasn’t abstract models we needed, but ways to understand the spread of behaviours, the ripple of interventions, the shockwaves in communities and economies.
The future doesn’t arrive neatly. It arrives like a tide, pulling us forward whether we’re ready or not.
So how do we prepare differently?
Not by predicting a single path. But by speculating — by opening up plural futures and asking: what if?
1. What if streets weren’t always for cars?
When councils in London, Paris and Milan introduced pop-up cycle lanes almost overnight, they weren’t just a transport tweak. They showed how quickly streets can be repurposed when health, environment and equity align. What began as an emergency measure opened the imagination: streets can be redesigned in days, not decades.
2. What if homelessness wasn’t inevitable?
In March 2020, the UK Government asked councils to bring “everyone in” from the streets, offering accommodation to rough sleepers regardless of status. For a moment, the long-held norm — that rough sleeping was part of urban life — was broken. It proved that with will and coordination, homelessness is not an unchangeable fact, but a political choice.
3. What if food was rooted in community, not just commerce?
In Barcelona, neighbourhood cooperatives like Som Alimentació restructured supply chains to favour local, ethical growers. What looked like a response to supermarket shortages became a rehearsal for a different food economy: one where resilience and fairness replace speed and scale.
Speculative design is not about fantasy. It’s about prefiguring — holding up fragments of possible worlds and asking: could this work, and for whom?
🌱 Calls to action
If speculation is to be more than talk, we need to practice it together. Here are some places to begin:
🔮 Run scenario sessions in your team meetings: take one “what if?” question and play it out. Who wins, who loses, what changes?
🗺 Map assets and needs locally: use speculative prompts to see how we might re-match what we already have to what people need.
🌀 Test social norms in small ways: what can we do now that shifts a harmful “given” — like rough sleeping — into something that is no longer tolerated?
🤝 Notice the ethical divide: when you look at partner organisations, suppliers, or businesses, ask not only “are they viable?” but “are they fair?”
Speculation is not escapism.
It is practice for the worlds we might have to live in sooner than we think.
The real risk is not that we imagine too much.
It’s that we don’t imagine enough.
