The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone of Design Imaginaries: A Layered Reflection on the Impact of Speculation

Paper i 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.