Most design work answers a question someone has already asked. Speculative design asks the question first. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who shaped the field at the Royal College of Art, describe it in Speculative Everything (2013) as using design to ask “what if”, and to open a debate about which futures we actually want, instead of trying to forecast them.

My task was to apply speculative design, not to predict the future, but to materialise one possible scenario so that people could discuss it before it happens.

A map of futures

Futurists often draw this as a cone. In Joseph Voros’s futures cone, probable futures follow current trends, plausible ones could happen given how the world works, possible ones might happen with knowledge we don’t have yet, and preferable futures are a value judgement laid over all of them. Speculative design lives mostly in the plausible zone: far enough out to be uncomfortable, close enough that you can’t wave it away.

The brief: grief as a product

Roman Sellner and Natálie Káčová gave me a scenario set in 2050, where grief tech is a common commodity. It is less distant than it sounds. In June 2022 Amazon showed an Alexa feature in development that read a bedtime story to a child in the voice of the child’s late grandmother, built from less than a minute of recorded speech. It never launched, but the demo was real, and so was the debate about consent that followed.

In the same year, both major diagnostic manuals, ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR, included prolonged grief disorder: grief that stays intense and disabling long after a loss. A product that promises comfort could, for some people, be the thing that keeps the wound open. That tension was the material I wanted to work with.

PulseNest

I built PulseNest, a pillow that plays back the heartbeat of a child who has died. Instead of one hero image, I showed its full life cycle: how it’s sold, reported and eventually discarded. Each stage is a separate artifact, in a format people already know from their own lives.

Phase 1, the catalog. PulseNest sits inside a department store catalog aesthetic, priced at £990, turning grief into a shopping cart item.

Phase 2, the news. A fictional 2050 news article normalises the technology in public debate.

Phase 3, the marketplace. A Facebook Marketplace ad sells the pillow once it’s no longer needed, colliding grief with consumerism. This is where the hardest questions surface: what happens to a child’s heartbeat when the object is resold, and who decides that someone no longer needs it?

Why banal works

The power of speculative design lies in its banality. Artifacts that look like your morning news feed are harder to dismiss than sci-fi props, and that’s where the unease sets in. A glossy concept render invites you to judge the design. A catalog page with a price tag invites you to imagine buying it.