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Futuring as a Present Practice

Northeastern University

Research Project, ongoing

This project was exhibited in Milan Design Week 2026. Upcoming exhibition in Society for Social Studies of Science Conference.  

The Brief

My dissertation topic is the processes through which teams develop high-tech consumer products. I focus on introducing theories from humanities to enrich the process, broaden the understanding of technology and offer alternatives in service of human flourishing. Building on Candy and Dunagan’s Experiential Futures Ladder, I create immersive narratives for design teams to engage deeply and critically with their technology of choice to navigate the open-ended capabilities of the tech into viable and desirable product architecture and affordances. 

 

Outcomes

  • Signal map

  • Futuring workshop

swamp.001.png

Futuring in the Cyberswamp: backcasting from a desirable future to offer many present trajectories

swamp2.001.png
The Process

My desk research on technology in daily life reveals a key insight: We have constructed social relationships with technologies that are becoming codified, narrowing down future product directions. As a response, I designed an immersive workshop to offer humanities and social sciences knowledge as a sandbox for design teams to engage with critical theory generatively, through doing rather than reading. 

 

This workshop aims to situate emerging technologies in specific, internally consistent and evocative futures to make their technical qualities tangible. The world I created is a tech-infused swamp built around feminist thinking. 

 

To create such a workshop on conversational AIs, I first identified  key tensions between my chosen technology and the new world, the Cyberswamp. These tensions are addressed in the world in new kinds of interactions LLM agents can offer. The workshop led to deep, reflective inquiries outside of the students’ daily experiences with AI, where they questioned the motives of AI tools they use. One participant reflected: “Interacting with different fish with their own internal worlds made me think about the role of AI. The final question I ended up with is, what is AI good for?”

Making abstract futures tangible through experiential scenarios

Design requirements for a Technofeminist world

Visualizing the physical environment

A technofeminist workshop for AI agent design: Conversational LLMs as fish scenario

Physical and immersive elements for engagement and reflection

The Impact

The workshop is a generative exercise in formgiving. Thinking about the “survival” of the format of an LLM-powered conversational agent in the Cyberswamp makes visible in what ways AI must change for this adaptation, and offers avenues for design in our present moment. Through this project I solidify my positioning between humanities and technology developers to find bridges between meaning and utility.

 

  • To consider how humans engage with technologies we can treat them as material culture and use trend forecasting methods to unpack their significance and social meanings. 

  • I drew from feminist technoscience to produce new frameworks to understand and critique technologies through and to steer tech development towards desirable futures.

  • Performance as a prototype lends itself well to in simulating interactions with AI.

  • The role of design in futuring in making abstract concepts tangible through storytelling 

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