Designing a Speculative Design Toolkit for Community Biodiversity Activism

Abstract

This paper forms part of a doctoral research project based on the proposition that a diverse Speculative Design practice can support community biodiversity activism, from which a Strategic Speculative Design Framework rooted in queer and more-than-human perspectives and theories was developed. This Framework forms the basis of the ongoing development of a Design Toolkit, which aims to be a practical application of the framework’s principles that can be applied in community biodiversity activism settings. The toolkit draws on speculative gaming elements to make the framework concepts accessible for a wide audience, and has been tested, both in terms of the overall concepts and in play-testing specific game elements, as part of the design process. The conclusions drawn from this iterative design and testing phase, which is still underway, are that the speculative strategies in the framework can indeed be a useful tool to engage communities in considering possible futures for the environment, but that this depends on the toolkit being designed in order that they can be understandable to a wide audience and being well structured that there is a logical flow between activities that will scaffold the participants to think speculatively and craft transformative speculations about the future of the ecosystem.