Speculative Realities 2050

We live in times of dynamic flux. Design is tasked with manifesting culture and future-minded designers that can provide valuable services which address the big questions of our time, be it overpopulation, water shortages, climate change, weaponised tech, energy crisis or a host of other ‘wicked’ problems. To be able to negotiate such a wide and complex terrain, we must get conversant with new tools and processes, to speculate, imagine, prototype, future-cast and manifest other realities and other ways of being. This studio employed tools of deep research, trends mapping, speculative fiction, design thinking and systems mapping to navigate these ideas. We paired traditional visualisation tools like photomontage, kit-bashing with emergent AI tools like MidJourney and Dall-E to create a universe of shared Indian futures, ranging from the utopian to the dystopian. Students then charted their way through these futures to visualise the human condition and lived experience through an array of artefacts, products and systems in the year 2050 across the worlds we share within our chosen bioregion of Gujarat. As a collective, we sought to answer the question: How can we become Better Ancestors?