Bringing speculative design to the Future of Human Reproduction team

The third in our ECR blog series, read about Andrew Darby, Research Associate in Speculative Design, University of Lancaster.

Joining the team

I joined the Future of Human Reproduction project because it offered an opportunity to work with speculation in new territory.

I'm very drawn to interdisciplinary working, or rather multidisciplinary working with interdisciplinary possibilities and I like the opportunity to see how others work. The project seemed like a good fit straight away.

Before FoHR, I was Artistic Director at LitFest Lancaster, where I spent 20 years convening creative spaces for intensive collaborative work. The FoHR project offered a chance to bring that approach into academic research.

My research contributions

The role was very much about introducing researchers to speculation as a methodological approach, specifically guiding them through developing design fictions. The intent was to get them to learn by doing, and for me to learn about some of the things they were doing as well.

I began by introducing the team to my PhD work, showing them the artefacts and describing the methodological framework I'd developed. I then introduced futures cones and speculative thinking. Using exercises with materials like Lego and Play-Doh, I encouraged the team to think through making rather than purely abstract discussion - it's a different cognitive process that allows speculations to develop organically. I introduced them to James Pierce's work on speculative strategies and used Professor Mark Blythe's technique of creating a fictional conference for which they submitted abstracts.

In 1:1 sessions, we produced artefacts for an ectogenesis exhibition. We created multiple exhibitions from this work - using what I'd initially conceived as training exercises as the actual outputs. This work was used at the Museum of Science and Industry, Lancaster Imagination Institute's Festival of Futures, Lancaster University's Health Innovation Campus, and the Swedish National Council on Bioethics 40th anniversary event in Stockholm, where audiences engaged with speculative scenarios around ectogenesis and in vitro gametogenesis.

We then created some additional work through teamwork for the IVG strand, and I did a couple of pieces by myself to reflect on that relationship.

I also co-authored journal articles with Dr Georgia Walton and contributed to conference papers with other team members.

Skills and development

Working with Georgia substantially improved my academic writing. She brings sharp editorial acuity to argument development.

I also developed expertise in bioethics that I didn't previously have. I can now hold my own and engage in bioethical conversations, identify multiple perspectives within arguments. I’m more aware of the bioethical conversations than I ever was and have developed an introductory expertise in it.

I gained appreciation for how different disciplines operate through observing the team's work and through our disciplinary workshops. I explored how fiction operates across disciplines. In some, it's not central to their methods; in others, it exists but under different terms. A hypothesis, for instance, is a kind of fiction. Fiction in law is a specific technique to address certain ways of having to understand the world. Understanding where and how speculation stretches across disciplines has been valuable and I’d like to build on that a little more.

I also learned important lessons about academic collaboration versus the festival and cultural work I'd done previously. In festival work, I could convene focused collaborative spaces. Academic work requires different rhythms - researchers balance multiple commitments simultaneously. I learned to plan and request working time earlier and more formally rather than responding reactively. This represents the shift from understanding work at RA level to developing senior researcher perspectives: leading space rather than reacting to it.

Current work and future directions

I'm currently finalising publications. One paper has been published “Speculation for Re: Addressing Unanticipated Consequence” by the journal Information Software Technology. I'm also completing a design journal publication involving transcription, coding, and final writing.

Looking ahead, I'd like to see us get further funding to continue this work in a much more thorough way. I want to see us intersect our methodologies much more clearly. I'd like to draw inputs from literature or from linguistics as starting points for creating speculations, then develop those not just with academics but also as parallel streams with participants – then bring those together as exhibitions and use them to generate debate in the public realm.

We've established strong foundations. The team works well together and understands collaborative possibilities in ways they didn't initially. Now we need to build on that foundation - producing more work, refining practice through iteration, and analysing the discursive spaces created by speculation through multiple analytical modes: close reading, linguistics, different formulations yielding different understandings.

Related Blogs

• 

  Meet FoHR's Early Career Researchers: Dr Georgia Walton

• 

  Meet FoHR's Early Career Researchers: Dr Alexandra Krendel

• 

  Exploring Tomorrow: Insights from Our Future of Human Reproduction Milestone Event

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