Speculative Design

Four Topics

I have decided that this idea that interests me the most is Paywalls and Advertisments since the subject of academic paywalling and Open Access is important as well as something that I personally believe in, having experienced academic paywalls over my time at University. While there are many resources that attending University gives me, there are still walls that can stop my research and waste time, as well as the fact that I believe it is unfair that those who don’t attend a university will not have access to academic resources and therefore academic knowledge without spending a lot of money.

Speculative Design

Speculative design means approaching design through the concept of imagining possible futures rather then solving present issues, which is an important process that leads people to question the present reality. Speculative design builds other worlds extrapolated from ‘social, cultural and political agendas’ which ultimately impacts reality (Smyth et al, 2021, p. 27).

As applied to designing our games, we took our themes and tried to imagine a world without it. I found trying to imagine a world without either Paywalls or Advertisments very difficult, since their existence is typically viewed as either/or: if you don’t have ads, your content will be paywalled; if you don’t have paywalls, your content will have ads. I tried to conceptualise this with some notes:

This is a collaged headline for a newspaper to introduce Paywalls and Advertisments to the world:

This was meant to establish that, in this world, there is an ‘Access Revolution’ that seeks to make resources available to the public that were not before through new paywalls and advertisments for knowledge.

I wrote some notes that establish the point of view of a politician who opposes these new paywalls and advertisments: