This is a critique of how designers deal with temporality in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critique, we reject the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing, as design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms. To make these issues visible, we dissect the Futures Cone model used in speculative design. As an alternative, the paper then presents hauntology as a vocabulary that can aid designers in accommodating pluriversal histories in anticipatory futures and reorienting their speculative tools. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, the paper highlights examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasizes the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, ones that engage with states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, the paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies.

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In the context of the designed-digital world, coming across instances of AI being discriminatory and biased in its implementation is a commonly discussed issue (Buolamwini, Gebru, 2018; Eubanks, 2019; O’Neil, 2017; Perez, 2021). However, to frame these instances as solely an AI issue to be fixed, addressed or explained (Alikhademi, 2021) discounts and ignores the underlying ‘real-world’ problems that are continually replicated, manifested and magnified into our digital lives, mediated by means of algorithms. AI, among other digital technologies, acts as a catalyst that expands these very real, human issues into the realm of the digital, moving from what used to be strictly physical and situated systems of oppression to ones that are global, now dealing with the geo-politics, cross-culture dynamics as well as contending histories of people, place and space in relation to each other. The paper is motivated by this impact of AI in amplifying and rendering more oppressive the effects of colonial design practices. With the intent to go to the bottom of the matter, the paper discards the idea that it is AI that needs fixing, and it offers instead an epistemological critique of how we speculate on the future and contend with uncertain outcomes in design. The paper articulates its critique by deconstructing how our designerly understanding and visualizations of temporality – such as the future cone and its contemporary iterations (Chou, 2021; Dunne & Raby, 2013; Hancock, T., & Bezold, C.,1994; Voros J, 2003) affects our ability to address historic pasts, contending present realities and imaginaries in speculative design models. In doing so, we identify the limitations that contribute to coloniality in designed futures. As an exploration of alternatives, we propose a hauntological framework and visualization to help designers accommodate and mobilize pluriversal histories into anticipatory futures. The paper begins with examples of how coloniality is encountered, reflected and perpetrated in and through our digital spaces is a designed manifestation of very real socio-political and economic systems of oppression in our physical lives. We focus on how the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries is due to a fundamental lack in understanding and engaging with temporality. The paper continues with an epistemological critique of the futures cone as one of the most popular and commonly co-opted and taught design tools to reimagine worlds and build imaginaries for digital futures through speculative design by designers and non-designers alike. Through this critique we identify and enunciate how the limitations contained within this model of speculation as well as the assumptions that it carries and reflects about temporality contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critical literature review of temporal reflection in contemporary speculative design, we then expand on the philosophical concept of hauntology (Derrida, 1994; Fischer, 2014) referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the matter of a ghost, and propose a hauntological framework as an alternative approach to: 1. Imagine and visualize temporality as the amorphous and mutating concept that it is, and 2. Introduce an expanded vocabulary that helps articulate the spectrality of events while providing some comfort through metaphors- a tool that is more familiar to designers. The paper concludes by proposing a hauntological understanding of temporality in speculative design- a temporality that is plural, political, situated and mutating.@en

My PhD project aims to offer a speculative design methodology for imagining and experimenting with future professional roles of designers and design practices for decolonial digital societies. To imagine the required competencies and professional roles in the digital future, one must contend with contextual uncertainties that come with the speculative process, along with the material uncertainty supplied in the form of data or algorithmic models. My project has the ambition to work with uncertainty as a material to be designed with and designed for. As AI amplifies and renders more oppressive the effects of Euro/Anglo-centric roots of design theory and practice, I intend to discard the idea that it is only AI that needs fixing (Alikhademi, 2021). I offer, instead, an epistemological critique of how we speculate and contend with uncertain outcomes and how these limitations contribute to coloniality in designed futures. I articulate this critique by deconstructing how the designerly understanding and visualization of historic time in relation to speculation – such as the future cone and its contemporary iterations (Chou, 2021; Dunne & Raby, 2013; Hancock, T., & Bezold, C.,1994; Voros J, 2003)– impair our ability to adequately address temporality in design as the confluence of historic pasts, contending present realities, and future imaginaries. In this PhD project, I introduce the concept of hauntology (Derrida, 1994) as a framework to understand issues of epistemic coloniality in speculative design and to develop an alternative, decolonial, designerly understanding of temporality. RELATION TO THE NORDES DESIGN RESEARCH COMMUNITY The metaphor and concept of hauntology lends itself perfectly to this year’s conference theme of blank spaces. Hauntology lays forth a simple principle: No entity can exist without the lack of another, that every presence is a cumulation of a range of absences (Fischer, 2014. “Spectres” embrace plurality and ambiguity, and go beyond “the sharp distinctions between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being” (Lorek-Jezińska, Więckowska, 2017). Hauntology raises questions of the provenance of the “ghost”, its intention, its limitations- much akin to the questions I am seeking to answer in relation to the uncertain nature of the outcomes of data-driven systems. How can specters of the past (colonization) and the future (decolonization) alter our world building processes? Could using hauntology as a methodological navigator, help us address the question of history and temporality of experience in speculative design practice? PLANS FOR THE PHD In pursuit of answering these questions, my short-term plan is to conduct surveys and interviews with design and development professionals working with AI to gain knowledge on how decoloniality is understood and the gaps and challenges that exist when moving from decolonial theory to practice. Simultaneously, I intend to begin experimenting and iteratively prototyping pedagogical instruments through design courses and workshops with students to explore hauntology as a methodology to engage with decoloniality in speculative design. Later in my PhD, I will apply this alternative design methodology myself as a speculative designer to propose an initial catalog of design skills, competencies, and roles for building and sustaining decolonial digital societies. @en

The Sensing in the Wild Lab is a speculative experiment in designing a de- centralised urban sensing system from a more-than-human perspective. It is part of DCODE, an H2020-ITN project that explores the future of designing with AI. During the Lab participants assume different identities – roleplaying as children but also as moss, as municipal authorities, as CCTV cameras, as pigeons, and as undocumented immigrants trying to evade the authorities – and are asked to feed into the sensing system data that reflects their particular perspectives and interests. The data partici- pants share, in the form of an image and text uploaded to a dedicated WhatsApp channel, helps to reveal both frictions and alignments among actors. In this, the Lab offers municipalities an opportunity to shift their thinking about the future smart city from a “system of systems” that is optimised for a few city dwellers to a much more distributed, inclusive meshwork in which data is contributed, circulated, and negoti- ated by humans and nonhumans alike.@en