Imagining what’s next: Future-focused industrial design at Virginia Tech

Speculative design is looking at the current technologies, the current pieces of science, even social medias, and trying to project that into a future upon which we can then design artifacts from the future and bring them to the present. So for this project, we decided to go 10 to 20 years into the future. And that's the maximum. It can be quite fun to go further than that, but one of the problems is that it just becomes quite preposterous, and we wanted to ground it in a little bit closer to reality, a little bit more close to home. Because speculative design has been very much a research oriented type of method. But we've also found you can do this not just on a research academic level, but even into a professional level, kind of the practical application of a design consultancy, because that's what we do, is we help our customers take things from take an idea to a marketable position or to production that gets just a little bit closer to the tangible reality of things. So to start what we ultimately did is look at at least three pieces of research or news articles and maybe even some videos talking about current events: environmental, technological and social, some societal challenges. From that, we went ahead and created mood boards to kind of tell this, the world, build worlds, and from the world building we were able to ask what if. And we did that through a storyboard. What if a human being was living in this world? What would be their life day to day? And from that point, it came from sketching, prototyping, and of course, this exhibition that we have. My question is, how do we design to help people kind of move back into nature and coexist with the world. So I designed Cove. It's a coexisting living system that you can bring into your home. It relies a lot on your local region, and using regenerative materials in your local area. There's an outside overgrowth layer made of vines that make it lattice, and then a seaweed layer and then mycelium tiles. So those kind of act as like a filter from like the outside world to your inside world. So the thermal cache uses rainwater that is heated by solar energy, and then it is funneled into your couch that will then heat your couch as well as your home. So the couch is made out of cob, which is natural clay, sand, any substrate you can find like straw, etc. and it hardens into a concrete-like material. So my project was to help people in need of crisis, or just family fun time, where they would need a raft or flotation device because of the new world that they're living in, it has higher water levels. I didn't want a pessimistic turnout for my speculative design project. I wanted to, I guess, have more of an optimistic green look on the world, instead of how there's no water or everyone's dying. So it's more of a the world's evolved not has been damaged and is healing. It was really fun to kind of like, research every little piece and bring it to life. Because I kind of worked with like my prototype especially, I thought that was the most fun, like making every single part. And then at the end, having it all come together into this large system like that final, like really rewarding model that I made was probably the best part. I think it's really helped me like put my mind into another setting instead of being stuck in the world that we are now. It's what world could we be in and what world could we be trying to fix? The jumps in progress between those milestones was impressive, but this last ten days since since we last engaged has been, it's been phenomenal. There was nothing that I wish I had seen from what they just showed. Right. They knocked it out of the park. So much distinct focus on their individual projects. I'm amazed by the amount of technology that gets incorporated from time to time. Making models, that's what we do as designers, making drawings, you know, thinking about human beings and incorporating ergonomics. But we haven't always been well known for just technology. And to see students come through and learn to code in a hot minute and create a working prototype. We're seeing some of that today and I'm absolutely loving it. I love the creativity. It's one of the most exciting things for me as an instructor, as a teacher and as an industrial designer. Creativity is kind of our bread and butter. And to see such a vast number of students putting it on display just is always exciting. This is my favorite part about doing a speculative study.