Speculative Design Agency Berlin – Design Fiction, Future Artifacts & Workshops
Bringing the future into the present as an artifact, to negotiate complex or sensitive topics
Ellery Studio develops speculative design formats and design fiction for organizations, research, urban development, and transformation. We create future artifacts, fictional situations, and workshop formats that make difficult topics accessible.
What good future artifacts need to achieve
How speculative design changes conversations
Abstract futures become concrete
Many questions about the future stay at the level of concepts. A speculative artifact gives them shape: a map, a form, an object, an interface, a rule, a product from a possible future.
Difficult topics get a detour
Retirement, New Work, AI, climate, urban development, or alternative mobility concepts quickly become charged. Design fiction creates distance. The group first talks about a possible future object and, in doing so, notices which values, fears, and assumptions are in the room.
People start talking
A good artifact lowers the barrier to entry and opens up new perspectives. You don't have to be a futures expert to react to a fictional product, a message from the future, or a strange everyday scene.
Sticking points become visible
Some discussions go around in circles for a long time. Speculative design shifts the question: What would happen if this future were already everyday life? Who would benefit? Who would have to adapt? What could go wrong?
Ideas become testable
Design fiction allows early reactions to concepts that don't exist yet. That helps with innovation, strategy, participation, and research before a lot of money flows in the wrong direction.
Applications for Speculative Design and Design Fiction
Where Ellery Studio works with future artifacts
Strategy and Organizational Development
Getting questions about the future off the slides
In strategy processes, future artifacts help people talk about new roles, ways of working, or business models. At VBKI, we worked with speculative entry points on New Work and the future of retirement. Especially with sensitive topics, the detour through a fictional future helps: people respond more honestly because they don't have to defend their own position right away.
Innovation and Product Ideas
Testing early concepts as future objects
The societal impact of an idea becomes more tangible as soon as it takes shape. That can be a fictional product, a service, an interface, or an instruction manual from the future. Artifacts like these help teams spot opportunities and side effects earlier. This is especially exciting in energy, mobility, digital infrastructures, or AI applications.
Urban Development and Smart Cities
How do we want to live in the future?
In smart city workshops, urban development formats, or participation processes, speculative design gets people making things right away. Participants build, describe, or modify future objects in co-creative formats and start exchanging ideas faster as a result. The discussion doesn't stop at "smart city" as a buzzword, but lands on everyday life, responsibility, and public space.
Research and Education
Scientific questions about the future as everyday situations
Projects like Biofictions or work on futures of the bioeconomy show how well design fiction works for research communication. Instead of just talking about technologies, markets, or sustainability, the question becomes: What could this feel like in everyday life? Which products would exist? What conflicts come up? Which future seems desirable, and which one seems rather uncanny?
Participation and Discussion Formats
Artifacts as conversation starters
In future workshops, real-world labs, or Design for Debate formats, future artifacts become working material. They lie on the table and are evaluated, modified, discarded, or developed further. This creates conversations that would often be hard to reach with an open discussion question.
How we work
From a future topic to an artifact that changes conversations
01
The starting point
We start with the question of what should actually be talked about. Is it a technological development, a societal tension, a strategic decision, or a topic that has been hard to access so far? Then we develop the speculative framework: Which future is assumed? From what perspective do we look at it? Which friction is productive?
02
The provocation
From this, artifacts, scenes, or small narrative worlds emerge. Sometimes a single object is enough. Sometimes it takes a series: several future postcards, fictional government letters, product packaging, interfaces, newspaper pages, role profiles, or everyday rules. What matters isn’t a perfect science-fiction world. What’s decisive is that the material is precise enough to trigger reactions.
03
The discussion
The workshop is built around it. We develop the introduction, tasks, facilitation, and documentation. Participants can read artifacts, comment on them, build on them, or weigh them against each other. In some formats, people craft things. In others, they discuss, sort, or vote. In the end, no loose creative exercise is left behind. The results are documented and translated for the work ahead.
Do you have difficult questions about the future that finally need to be put up for discussion?
Our Services: Speculative Design, Design Fiction & Future Artifacts
Formats for conversations about possible futures
To make possible futures tangible and open to discussion, we combine specialist knowledge, speculative design, critical design, and design fiction. Together with subject-matter experts, we translate abstract developments, uncertainties, and questions about the future into concrete scenarios, artifacts, and experiences — as a basis for exchange, reflection, and new perspectives.
Speculative Design
For questions about the future that should become tangible as an object, scene, or everyday situation.
Design Fiction
For fictional artifacts from possible futures: letters, interfaces, news items, products, or rules.
Future Artifacts
For conferences, bar camps, workshops, exhibitions, strategy processes, or participation formats.
Workshops
For groups that want to explore, design, and evaluate possible developments together.
Design for Debate
For topics with tension, uncertainty, or political friction.
Workshop Materials and Facilitation
For cards, roles, prototypes, tasks, facilitating conversations, and documenting results.
Speculative Design Team
Experts in exploratory futures work
Our foresight specialists develop speculative formats that get groups working. They include futures researchers, facilitators, and designers who sort out complex topics and translate them into good working material.
Let's talk!
👉 Request a free initial consultation.
Back to the service overview
Our strategic triad
Curious, creative, and fully committed, we don't just think along — we think ahead. We cut through complexity to move quickly into action. That's how we shape the future, share knowledge, and guide change.
Foresight
We shape futures
Strategic Foresight
Futures Research
Trend Radar
Speculative Design
Scenarios
Design
We communicate knowledge
Infographics
Data Visualization
Explainer Videos
Science Communication
Spatial Communication
Transformation
We guide change
Change Management
Organizational Culture
Workshop Facilitation
Participation Formats
Process Facilitation
