What is Speculative Futures Amsterdam?
Speculative Futures Amsterdam, a local chapter of the global platform Speculative Futures.
Speculative Futures is an international community of meetups focused on Speculative & Critical Design, Design Fiction, Futurism, and Strategy & Foresight and any vision or approach which involves using design as a vehicle to speculate about potential or alternate futures. Are you also interested in those topics and want to join for a meetup? Or perhaps want to share your speculative design project? Stay tuned and follow us on our meetup page or instagram page
We host speakers — practitioners, designers, artists, teachers, students, and other professionals who will be talking about relevant praxis and methods and inspiring projects about future thinking and envisioning futures.
We also host workshops that will allow you to learn how to conduct and apply futures thinking in a variety of circumstances as a method of synthesis and strategy.
Who are the driving forces of Speculative Futures Amsterdam?
The Speculative Futures Amsterdam chapter is founded by Theo Ploeg of Studio Hyperspace together with Mick Jongeling. The Speculative Futures Amsterdam chapter is now led by Shauna Jin, Program Head of Digital Society School and Nicole Spit of DesignStudio Dáárheen.
Shauna Jin, organizer and co-lead of Speculative Futures Amsterdam is a curious designer, thinker and doer who is passionate about sustainability. She is also program head of the Digital Society School (part of the Amsterdam University of applied sciences, at the Digital Society School they research the impact of technology on society, develop the skills necessary to guide the transformation and pass on this knowledge and these skills to a new generation of professionals.)
Nicole Spit, organizer and co-lead of Speculative futures Amsterdam. Nicole is a speculative designer, originating in productdesign, and owner of design Studio Dáárheen. ‘I convert striking findings or issues that amaze me from my (trend-) research into speculative design and art objects’.
Theo Ploeg, initiator of Speculative Futures Amsterdam,SFA ambassador and in his own words “Renegade sociologist caught up in design, uses speculative design to tell meaningful and positive stories of alternative realities’. Theo is owner of Studio Hyperspace.
What is Speculative Design?
With speculative design, a tool for future thinking and creating, we try to focus on the preferred futures. We cannot predict the future, there are many different possibilities, but we can think about possible futures based on current developments. We can also use ‘Backcasting’, backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present.
Are you also interested in Speculative design and Future thinking and do you want to join for a meetup? Or perhaps want to share your speculative design project? Stay tuned and follow us on our meetup page or instagram page . We would love to welcome you in our community and are also interested in your thoughts.