Change the Future, Change the Now

SWISP Lab stands for “Speculative Wanderings in Space and Place” and is a duet of speculative a/r/tographers who co-create and co-design with young people in Anthropogenic times. 'Change the Future, Change the Now' was born from many co-participatory workshops with young people, and finalised as an object after the 'The Futures of Learning Speculative Design Toolkit' SWISP Lab Hackathon. In this HAK in 2023, we asked young people from 4 Melbourne secondary schools to consider how we exist in the world, and how design education might rethink, reimagine and revisit how design can help us make sense of being in the world. We spent 2 days hacking how being concerned with possibilities, not probabilities, and considering preferences over a set of possible futures might help or hinder attempts to encounter and exist in the world.

Co-design and speculative design are key participatory design methods. To bring design education communities together and to raise the perception and value of contemporary design education in schools these methods and toolkit can aid in professional learning and development of design educators as collaborators, shifting pedagogical and methodological practices in line with the community and new design approaches.​