Speculative Practices: Tasty Temptations
The Speculative Practices module focuses on speculative thinking, physical making and designed objects. The project fundamentally interrogates how speculation can be advanced through matter rather than through representation and explores how made things—objects, prototypes, working models—can function as arguments.
FS 2025 Brief: Tasty Temptations (together with MA Trends & Identity)
This project invited students to critically examine current food consumption patterns and imagine alternative futures shaped by emerging trends, shifting values, and global challenges. They explored the cultural, ecological, and technological dimensions of food through the lens of scenario development and speculative design.
Food is more than nourishment. It reflects identity, culture, and social structures. Yet behind every meal lies a complex system influenced by agriculture, politics, climate, and technology. Students analysed these interconnections and used them as a foundation to develop future-oriented narratives that question how and what we might eat in the decades to come.
Through trend analysis, weak signal scanning, and scenario building, students developed design concepts that were translated into diegetic artefacts. These artefacts took the form of full-scale objects and scenes, allowing students to give physical presence to their research. By materialising abstract ideas into tangible forms, the work invited critical reflection and opened up new ways of engaging with possible futures.
The module encouraged a critical and creative approach to design, empowering students to explore how food systems might evolve and how design can contribute to shaping more resilient futures.
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