The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone of Design Imaginaries: A Layered Reflection on the Impact of Speculation
Paper in proceeding, 2026
Smart homes are often dominated by workplace values such as productivity and efficiency, despite design research efforts. Inspired by Exquisite Corpse and the children's Telephone Game (Flüsterpost), Flüsterfutures expands smart home design imaginaries through co-design and speculative design. Linearly, we document this design process: 1) members of the public created smart home visions using the Tiles IoT Toolkit; 2) speculative designers re-interpreted these into artifacts defined by productive mismatches, friction, and ambiguity; and 3) a writer and an artist synthesized the resulting discussions into stories and visuals. Layered atop this documentation, we I) analyze how misunderstandings enhance the initial visions and unpack the promise of technology; II) reflect on the collective struggle of speculative co-design to initiate actual change; and III) pro-pose what future researchers may learn from this to create more actionable interfaces between speculation and the real world, particularly for the age of generative design.
Author
Arne Berger
University for Applied Sciences - Anhalt
Jasper E. Schulte
University for Applied Sciences - Anhalt
Julia Weller
Freelance artist
Jesse Josua Benjamin
Eindhoven University of Technology
Joseph Lindley
Lancaster University
San Sarabil
University for Applied Sciences - Anhalt
Mafalda Samuelsson-Gamboa
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Interaction Design and Software Engineering
University of Gothenburg
Benedikt Haupt
Leipzig University
Christian Pentzold
Leipzig University
Alexa Becker
University for Applied Sciences - Anhalt
C and C 2026 Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition
1167-1179
9798400725838 (ISBN)
18th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference, C and C 2026
London, United Kingdom,
London, United Kingdom,
Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Information Systems, Social aspects
Human Computer Interaction
Design
DOI
10.1145/3803784.3809272