Design and architecture, since their rapid development during the 20th century, have played an uncritical supporting role in industry and the applications of technology in our everyday lives. Most of the time, without reflecting on the implications of their actions. Unfortunately, they have lost their connection with the original modernistic principles, such as a holistic view of the world and ecosystems and the support of technology and science for adaptation to and taking care of existing ecosystems. As the drivers of consumerism, architecture and design had their role in the foundations of the so-called Anthropocene (or Capitalocene), which has, more than ever in human history, brought extreme catastrophic scenarios that are likely to take place in the near future.
Both design and architecture, as fields of practice, have the potential to detect, mediate and generate new relations and to encourage radical imagination. This potential has been documented and discussed over more than 20 years of speculative design and related critical and future-orientated practices. Those practices have contributed to the development of design and architecture as worldmaking agents, bringing possibilities in exploring diverse versions of the world, helping us understand our environments and develop our capabilities to transform them. Speculative design has been used successfully as an experimental environment to test different hypotheses about our lives in the future.
The approach we named “Mediterranean speculative approach“, practiced far away from European urban and technological centers, “on the edges of Europe“, is used to take this somewhat “off“ perspective, and dystopian scenarios are perceived from a human-centered perspective. The focus of our speculative practice is set on implications of important global topics in the local context; how will recent and emerging technological, economic, social and political changes impact the local context.
