Leverhulme Doctoral Programme for Regenerative Innovation (Regnr8-i): Developing Speculative Design Tools to Envision Radical Regenerative Futures

Aims:

This research aims to design, deploy, evaluate and disseminate participatory tools that enable non-designers—practitioners in diverse technical, social and environmental fields—to use speculative design methods to envision and prototype regenerative innovations involving their areas of specialism.

Regenerative innovation seeks to not only meet human needs but also restore and actively enhance natural systems. Worldwide, every discipline and industry must embrace regenerative innovation if we are to build a sustainable future. Doing so will require enormous creativity, often on the part of people who work outside the traditional creative industries.

By equipping non-designers with accessible speculative design tools, this research aims:

• to empower individuals from various disciplines to actively and creatively participate in defining regenerative futures
• to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue and knowledge exchange
• to promote creative and critical thinking to address complex challenges
• to enable experimentation and rapid prototyping of novel ideas, and consideration of wider future contexts and potential impacts.

Context:

Speculative design is a broad set of practices used by designers to imagine alternative futures, ask carefully crafted questions, and propose radical alternatives to prevailing assumptions about social, environmental and technological practice and direction of travel.

Speculative design, rather than directly aiming to find the ‘best’ solution to an identified problem, uses design-led processes to explore and envision possible futures. It is a relatively low-stakes way to explore a wide range of possibilities. The lack of immediate imperative to find ‘good’ solutions encourages creativity, lateral and holistic thinking and consideration of wider context.

Co-design and participatory design uses tools and methods by which non-designers are empowered to engage in complex and creative design activity. This research will create tools that are accessible to non-designers without previous understanding of speculative design, but who have highly developed knowledge and experience in diverse fields.

Our approach is playful, visual and practice-led. We advocate accessible, nuanced, aesthetically considered materials to engage participants with the subject, the method, and to set the tone and spirit of their engagement.

Possible speculative design practices to be employed in this research include design fiction, speculative prototyping, world-building, social dreaming and conceptual design. Visual communication will be central.

Possible Methodologies

• Context and background: Researching models of speculative design and regenerative innovation, including case studies. Development of design-led strategies to engage and communicate with audiences on these key concepts.
• Tool Development: Iterative design and testing of tools, including interactive printed materials, cultural probes, workshops, digital platforms.
• Testing and evaluation: Deployment of tools with interdisciplinary groups of experts. Analysis of process, outcomes and reflections of participants
• Impact Assessment: Measuring the impact of the tools on participants’ creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving abilities, including development of evaluation framework.

Potential impact

• An open-source collection of evaluated tools which help non-designers to engage in regenerative innovation by using speculative design approaches.
• A community of practice for non-designers interested in speculative design and regenerative innovation.
• Increased decision-maker awareness of design-led approaches as a means of developing and informing policy

For informal enquiries about the project, contact Dr Andrew Cook: aazcook@dundee.ac.uk

APPLICATION PROCESS

Step 1 – Applicants are recommended to make contact as early as possible ahead of the deadline with the lead supervisor and (1) send a copy of your CV and (2) discuss your potential application and any particular needs.

Step 2 – After discussion with the lead supervisor, formal applications can be made via the following form: REGNR8-I Scholarship Application Form 2025_UK Students.docx. Please use this form instead of the register of interest form below.

QUALIFICATIONS

Applicants should have first-class, or an upper second-class (2.1) Honours degree AND a Master’s degree in discipline(s) relevant to their selected topic, unless applying for the Master’s Plus with its alternative requirements (see application form). 

English language requirement: IELTS (Academic) overall score must be at least 6.5 (with not less than 5.5 in reading, listening, speaking and 6.0 in writing). The University of Dundee accepts a variety of equivalent qualifications and alternative ways to demonstrate language proficiency; please see full details of the University’s English language requirements here: www.dundee.ac.uk/guides/english-language-requirements.