SWISP Lab's Co-designed Speculative Project: The Futures of Learning

We begin by acknowledging that we learn, teach and research on the lands of the Kulin Nations. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people’s ongoing connections and custodianship to Country through the land, waterways and skies as the longest continuous human community. We acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. 

We are thankful for the Creative Futures Design Research and Education Fund’s support of this work and activism in design education.  

The Futures of Learning arises from the urgent need for innovative models of community-based education that explore human-land-technology relationships as collective expression and mobilisation of knowledge. This project engages with grand challenges affecting young people, particularly those associated with the climate crisis and intensified use of digital technologies which can both mitigate and contribute to ecological collapse. We ask what role does speculative design education play in this space? Speculative design is sometimes called critical design or design fiction which requires zooming out beyond user-centred design and asks what the effects of the designs could be on future societies. It’s concerned with possibilities, not probabilities, pushing people to consider their preferences over a set of possible futures and the ways in which objects are designed, help or hinder their attempts to build those futures.  

The 2-day hacks were guided by the following questions to encourage creative risk-taking in the interest of generating new knowledge through lived experience:  

• What might be the futures of learning?  
• What if mobile technologies were used as an expansive medium for creative problem-solving and social justice for the futures of learning?  
• How might it spark new ideas for intercultural climate futures and drive systemic change in design education?  

Our ‘hacking’ as method has been co-designed and tested with the SGM 'Sci Curious' youth steering committee as a practice-based approach for collaborative and creative problem solving (2020). These hackathons are designed to hack curriculum and speculate on The Futures of Learning over 2 days. In these sessions, participants respond to the provocation: What might be the futures of learning?  in groups of 2-5 individuals and co-design a speculative possibility through collaborative inquiry framed by the Speculative practice architectures developed in studioFive with visual arts and design teacher candidates.  

1. Scenario building 

2. Backcasting - Futurecasting

3. Artefacts from the Future 

4. Futures tanglegram

5. Fictional narrative

These five practices central to our method as collaborators for the Futures of Learning facilitate a community in collaboration to co-create and co-design for use by key stakeholders in education to: 

Co-design a toolkit co-created by the participants and hosted by us in a digital space for archiving and accessible by DATTA and Visual Communication Victoria as well our future Design educators. Because it’s co-design and co-created by the participants the output is not fixed; in a speculative design the participants would create the conditions and contextualise their needs around the problem - the future of learning. The toolkit involving a modular set of digital and virtual tools is designed/built.