The Dangerous Power of Speculation, a design exhibition

Melbourne Design Week, Modern Times Gallery, 25 March – 1 April, 2021.

We, the Robots? Book launch and digital exhibition, selected by the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, 2021.

The Dangerous Power of Speculation, a design exhibition

Being human involves making choices. Whenever we make a choice, it means that we could have made a different one. But which choice should we make? This is what ethics are; they help us work out how to act.

An ethical dilemma is what happens when there’s a conflict between these choices, where no matter what a person does, some ethical principle will be compromised.

Speculative design uses scenarios to travel ahead in time and paint a picture of what could happen if we don’t take new directions in the present. Speculative design can help locate our ethics and bring about the new futures we want to create for ourselves.

In Lucy’s exhibition, you are invited to design your future by responding to ethical dilemmas and speculative scenarios, framed as a series of impossible questions and visuals across 4 screens. Each response you make builds upon the last, strengthening or weakening the ethical direction of that future scenario through each choice.

The visuals are designed to prime your choices and challenge your ethical norms through the burden of dilemmas.

The consequences of choice making are exaggerated with the intent to supercharge the discovery of your own set of ethical values.

The Dangerous Power of Speculation design exhibition for Melbourne Design Week ran between 25 March – 1 April 2020 at Modern Times, Fitzroy Melbourne.

This event was part of Melbourne Design Week 2021, an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV. Full program at designweek.melbourne

The Exhibition experiment

The exhibition featured an interactive experiment to enable participants to respond to the ethical dilemmas. A simpler version exists here: