TechnoMirage
How might we identify potential consumer preferences in 2050 using community-driven design processes?
Bigwidesky, a communication and foresight consultancy, wanted to help their community explore speculative design as a tool for strategic foresight. We collaborated on a five-month engagement to host a community-driven, three-part interactive webinar series focused on futures literacy and speculative design. The series introduced Bigwidesky’s five-step foresight process—probleming, researching, imagining, gathering insights, and strategizing—while guiding participants in co-designing artifacts and products from 2050. Deliverables included speculative design artifacts, narratives, and a takeaway futures starter kit.
Between sessions, our team conducted sociocultural research to refine the community’s speculative concepts, ultimately producing the Human+ 2050 product catalog featuring three finalized, future-forward artifacts. Visual renders and narratives brought these artifacts to life, immersing participants in a plausible 2050 future and demonstrating how speculative design can inform business strategy. This project exemplified participatory futures literacy, with each artifact grounded in sociocultural signals of change and shaped by the collective imagination of Bigwidesky’s community.
Partner
Underground Art And Design (UAAD)
Services
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Creative AI consulting and ethics training
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Speculative Design Workshop
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Event experience design
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Design-led research
Method
In collaboration with Underground Art and Design, we are co-creating Technomirage, an international event series and open call spanning both in-person and virtual formats. The program invites critical engagement with AI’s social, ethical, and cultural implications—bringing together global creative communities through speculative design, performance, and public dialogue.
The series unfolds across three main formats:
Reclaim: A panel featuring artists and cultural practitioners resisting dominant AI narratives—surveillance, optimization, bias—and reclaiming AI to build stories of care, agency, and refusal
Reimagine: A hands-on speculative design workshop led by Liminal, where participants become future archaeologists using AI to prototype artifacts from their preferred futures
Rewire: Intimate audiovisual performances that disrupt machine logic through movement, sound, and glitch
Additional components include a virtual exhibition, a public panel co-hosted with Parsons School of Design, and a culminating publication that captures insights and tensions surfaced through the series.
