Speculation & Futures

Speculative work from places where the present is already hard: Antarsam, counter-design, and storytelling in Wayanad.

Most speculative design asks “what if?” from a position of comfort. These pieces ask it from places where the present is already hard.

Antarsam is a thought experiment: what if Subhashchandra Bose had survived in 1943, and India had built decentralised, ant-colony-inspired food systems instead of the Green Revolution? The fiction is a way to treat infrastructure as a choice that could have gone differently, and still could. It draws on hauntology and on the community network work in Bidar.

In Wayanad, after the 2018 floods, I worked with Paniya children to make tapestry stories about their futures. It grew out of research into centuries of enslavement, landlessness, and exclusion from education, and tried to make room for aspirations that dominant narratives had denied.

Counter-design asks the opposite question: not what future to imagine, but how to resist the ones being imposed. How do interfaces manipulate perception, and what would it mean to design against platforms that manufacture engagement and authenticity? The Imposter Among Us looks at the same erosion through Twitch and livestreaming politicians, and what happens when performance and sincerity stop being distinguishable.