Speculative designs: Making geographical concepts

A sense of vibrancy infuses accounts of geographical concepts, yet the prosaic endeavour of making them remains unexamined. Engaging Deleuze and Guattari, who regard concepts as composed of mutable matter with the ability to bring unexpected variations, this paper discusses attempts to deploy concepts less as semantic units belonging to a rarefied realm of theory than multimodal processes that facilitate experimentation with differently embodied and emplaced issues. Offering three critical figures to complement these efforts—the unevental, the unruly, the uncommon—the paper revisits the precarious design of a speculative research artefact to diversify practices and pedagogies of conceptualisation within geography.