Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology: Using Fiction to Explore Facts!

Design often uses speculation as a way to imagine objects freed from constraints of time, technological limitations, and other aspects of present reality. What value might ethnographers find in utilizing speculative approaches? Answering this question isn’t so easy. For ethnographers, the speculative flights of fancy typical in design are antithetical to our methods and our goals. Another stumbling block is that design speculation too often defaults to a set of assumptions privileging modernist form, westocentric ideas, capitalist world view, and, increasingly, neoliberalism. Another barrier is that anthropology focuses on producing texts (whether written or visual). Making speculative things, then, has not been an ethnographic pursuit. https://elizabethjchin.com/portfolio/laboratory-of-speculative-ethnology/