Speculation & Futures

Speculative design, as it is typically taught, asks “what if?” from positions of comfort- studio-bound provocations for gallery audiences. The work here tries to ask the same question from places where the present is already untenable, and where imagining alternatives is not an exercise but a necessity.

Antarsam began as a thought experiment: what if Subhashchandra Bose had survived in 1943, and India had pursued decentralised, ant-colony-inspired food systems instead of the Green Revolution? The speculative fiction became a way to think about infrastructure not as inevitable but as the result of choices that could have gone differently- and still could. This kind of thinking shaped how I approach speculative design more broadly, drawing on hauntology, community networks, and the practical work happening in places like Bidar.

In Wayanad, speculation became something more urgent. After the 2018 floods, working with Paniya children to build tapestry stories about their futures was not an academic exercise in critical design. It grew from research into centuries of systemic oppression- enslavement, landlessness, educational exclusion- and tried to create space for communities to articulate aspirations that dominant narratives had long denied them.

Counter-design takes a different angle: instead of imagining new futures, it asks how we might resist the ones being imposed on us. How do interfaces manipulate perception? What would it mean to design against the affordances of platforms that manufacture engagement, authenticity, and truth? The Imposter Among Us explored a related question through the lens of Twitch and livestreaming politicians- how platforms compel the manufacturing of “truth” and what it means when digital cultures erode the distinction between performance and sincerity.

The thread running through these pieces is a suspicion of who typically gets to imagine futures, and a commitment to doing that imaginative work from the ground rather than from the studio.