Speculative Design as Thought Experiment

Cog as a thought experiment

In her presentation at the Monte Verità workshop, Maja Mataric showed us a videotape of her robots cruising together through the lab, and remarked, aptly: "They're flocking, but that's not what they think they're doing." This is a vivid instance of a phenomenon that lies at the heart of all the research I learned about at Monte Verità: the execution of surprisingly successful "cognitive" behavi...

Notes on Leibniz thought experiment

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (1714), §17 [1]: “Besides, it must be admitted that perception, and anything that depends on it, cannot be explained in terms of mechanistic causation – that is, in terms of shapes and motions. Let us pretend that there was a machine, which was constructed in such a way as to give rise to thinking, sensing, and having perceptions. You could imagine it expan...

Rethinking experiment design as algorithm design

As experimentation in the behavioral and social sciences moves from brick-andmortar laboratories to the web, new opportunities arise in the design of experiments. By taking advantage of the new medium, experimenters can write complex computationally mediated adaptive procedures for gathering data: algorithms. Here, we explore the consequences of adopting an algorithmic approach to experiment de...

Speculative design: crafting the speculation

The article positions the author’s work as speculative design but—like the term design fictions—is open to several interpretations. How is the fictional character of such work conceptualised and produced? What kinds of speculation are involved? The article considers the value of one particular approach and argues that speculative design serves two distinct purposes: first, to enable us to think...

Nuclear War in Europe: A Thought Experiment