Stop Nigmas: Experimental Speculative Design through Pragmatic Aesthetics and Public Art

This paper describes a project titled Stop Nigmas which explores the future of privacy and surveillance. Guided by pragmatic philosophy and approaches from futures studies, speculative design, the project seeks to demonstrate how interactive objects can be used to engage the audience in creating alternative narratives about the future. In the first section, the paper outlines a narrative in a form of a timeline of events that leads to a future with explicitly restricted privacy in public spaces. Following the timeline of events, the paper describes the process of scenario development, object design, interaction design and audience engagement. The author outlines how engagement through public art and social media allows the interactive object to serve as means of speculation through John Dewey's notion of consummatory experience, allowing both the designer and the audience to act as agents of speculation. The paper concludes that pragmatic aesthetics and futures studies can provide useful guidance in designing speculative objects and interactions that are open to dialogue and participation. It suggests new research avenues for speculative design research in human-computer interaction (HCI).