Caitlin Crutcher

This paper positions Black senses of place and the labor of placemaking as central to speculative design practice. We foreground the social, cultural, and historical specificities of place as experienced by Black communities long subjected to racial violence. Drawing from a participatory speculative design project with seniors and youth in Detroit, we show how visions of sociotechnical alternatives emerged from community members’ situated experiences of their neighborhoods and place-based cultural practices. We argue that speculative design must engage placemaking to confront three interrelated forms of nowhereness, namely the rendering of Black life as placeless within racialized spatial orders, the erasure of Black futures through dominant technocratic futurity, and speculation itself operating from and for nowhere, detached from place and accountability. We conceptualize and advocate for a shift from nowhere to now-here within speculative design, offering practical implications for grounding futurity in lived places, relational labor, and Black livingness. This reorients speculative design toward a place-based practice that centers the agency of impacted communities in imagining and enacting sociotechnical worlds otherwise.

This paper reconsiders knowledge sharing as a relational process of disorientation and reorientation, which is a way of turning toward others, the world, and possible futures. Drawing on an intergenerational participatory speculative design project in a historically Black neighborhood, we show how seniors and youth shared knowledge of turning toward the affective, more-than-human relations, as well as toward one another and collective futures. These practices reoriented participants across differences toward one another and their community, cultivating new cross-generational relationships and shared imagination. Building on Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation and Black feminist thought, we argue that knowledge sharing is less about efficiency or productivity and more about relational alignment—negotiating how communities come together and move together toward otherwise futures. For HCI, this critical reframing foregrounds the racialized histories and everyday labors that sustain collective orientations, urging scholars and designers to consider how communities can collectively (re)orient themselves epistemically and ontologically through design, and what otherwise worlds those reorientations make possible.