Contamination, Otherness, and Negotiating Bottom-Up Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Participatory Speculative Design

Participatory Design scholars and practitioners have embraced speculative design approaches to challenge normative assumptions about sociotechnical futures and address the systemic lack of racial and class diversity in futuring. This paper draws upon a community-based participatory speculative design (PSD) project conducted with a group of working-class Detroiters, focusing on speculating about alternative community economies. We illustrate how PSD served as a process of ongoing “contamination” where the boundaries of community members’ visions of desired futures are opened up, troubled, and negotiated on the individual, alliance, and collective levels, thus forming new commons for collaboration and resistance across differences. For them, such contamination was a reflexive process aimed at identifying whose visions were excluded from their own and how community-held sociotechnical imaginary could emerge through collaboration. We argue that foregrounding contamination in PSD makes meaningful space for fostering reflexivity in knowledge production, while destabilizing and reassembling more inclusive sociotechnical futures.