Jono Shaw

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Things from Your Future

An AI-assisted reflective tool that formulates critical probes for designers to stress-test their propositions through future-facing ideas and ethical provocations.

# Speculative Design
# Design Ethics
# AI in Pedagogy


Contributors
Prof Stephen Loo
Dr Haider Akmal

2025 · Web Tool


Critical Design · Web Design · AI-Assisted Pedagogy Design
Presented at ACUADS Conference 2025: Disobedience
Things from Your Future (TFYF) is a web-based reflective design tool created for postgraduate design students, researchers and educators. It invites users to describe a design proposition, then fomulates two sets of future-facing responses: Ideas from Your Future and Provocations from Your Future. Rather than offering solutions, the tool produces unexpected but plausible reframings and ethical questions that help users examine hidden assumptions, long-term consequences, stakeholder tensions, and overlooked dependencies within their projects.

The project sits at the intersection of speculative design, design ethics and AI-assisted pedagogy. It asks whether generative AI, a system often built around compliance, pattern recognition and optimisation can be deliberately used to produce forms of critical disobedience. In this sense, TFYF becomes a pedagogical experiment, a way for designers to externalise critique, rehearse ethical uncertainty, and encounter their own propositions from the estranged perspective of possible futures. Its interface supports both quick ideation and structured reflection, while local history, downloadable visual cards, and shareable outputs make the generated provocations useful within studios, critiques, workshops and research discussions.


Framework
Things from Your Future explores how generative AI can be positioned as a critical companion in design education. The tool slows the design process down by providing speculative ideas and ethical provocations that challenge the proposition from the standpoint of possible futures.

The project attempts to explore a central paradox in contemporary AI-supported design education: how can an obedient, non-intentional computational system be used to generate disobedient, critical and ethically provocative design prompts? Drawing from speculative design and posthuman pedagogy, TFYF reframes this paradox as a distributed moral system involving the designer, the AI agent, and the technical architecture that constrains both.



Generative Speculative Design as Critical Ethical Disobedience: A Provocation
Haider Akmal, Jonathan Shaw, Stephen Loo


Interaction Design and Use Case
In the 2nd edition of TFYF, the interface is designed around two modes of reflective engagement. Expression Mode supports users who already have a formed proposition and want to test it quickly. Guided Mode scaffolds early-stage thinking through seven structured prompts, helping users articulate the issue, audience, context, dependencies, intended behavioural change, uncertainties and additional concerns. This dual-mode structure makes the tool useful across different stages of design development, from ambiguous early exploration to more focused proposition critique.

In teaching contexts, TFYF can be used before studio critique, during project framing, or as a reflective exercise after concept development. It gives students a structured way to move beyond problem-solution thinking and encounter their proposals as contested, situated and ethically unstable artefacts. The tool is especially useful for prompting discussion around unintended consequences, stakeholder absence, infrastructural dependency, and the politics embedded in design futures.


Discussion
As generative AI becomes increasingly normalised in design and education, this project asks how such systems might support not faster production but deeper forms of critique. Instead of treating AI as a tool for generating polished concepts or persuasive outputs, Things from Your Future positions it as a mechanism for slowing down design judgement, making assumptions visible, introducing productive discomfort, and helping designers stay with uncertainty.

The project contributes a research-through-design exploration of how human–AI interaction can be structured around more reflection than optimisation. It examines the pedagogical value of AI-generated provocation as a way to rehearse ethical reasoning, expose the limits of design intent, and question the responsibilities distributed across students, educators, AI systems and the infrastructures that shape them.

In this sense, the project contirbutes to the field by offering a more critical model for AI-supported design practice. It asks how AI might help designers become more accountable and attentive to the futures their proposals may produce.