Immediations and rhythms of speculative design: Implications for value in design‐based research

Abstract

This paper presents data from the first six‐months of an ongoing speculative design project in which youth and researchers co‐created a videogame club, and later an eSports team, in an urban youth centre in Montréal, Québec. It describes how process philosophy informed researchers’ approach to speculative design, allowing youth and researchers to co‐compose a sense of value for the club and the potentials for what they could do together through the club. This speculative process is contrasted with structuralist approaches to design‐based research in education, which can overly or pre‐determine value and mechanisms of social change, with or without the collaboration of youth and communities.

Reconceptualising Design-Based Research

“…There have been attempts to further develop DBR, for example, by describing how projects should strive to conduct more effective, sustainable and scalable projects (Fishman et al, 2013). Other scholars who have attempted to develop DBR draw on methods from speculative design, emphasising the transformational element of DBR (Ehret et al, 2019), thereby pushing the design element forward. Despite these developments, DBR methodology appears to struggle with many and diverse critical issues that may indicate that DBR has become too complex, or even too complicated, to realise.…”