Designing for Entangled Speculation: A Research Through Design Approach for Exploring Wicked Problems

Abstract

This dissertation explores entanglement as a structuring logic for speculative engagement, aiming to unsettle dominant ontologies and epistemologies to and expand design practice toward the ethical demands of an entangled world. This approach matters because the wicked problems we face in the 21st century, such as climate crisis, social inequity, global health crises, and extractive infrastructures, resist tidy solutions and expose the limits of conventional design frameworks that rely on separability, linear causality, or predictable outcomes. Grasping the magnitude, scale, and complexity of these challenges remains to be understood and will require new methods, approaches, and practices that can hold contradiction, that can embrace the unknown, that can imagine pathways of transformation. Many fields, disciplines, and communities develop their own knowledge practices for creating and maintaining contributions of meaning and understanding of how our world is entangled, from social and ecological entanglements found in HCI, social science, anthropology, animal studies, multispecies justice, critical geographies, law, art, and design, to the scale of entangled particles in quantum physics. By integrating insights of quantum mechanics with design speculation, this research acknowledges the world as it actually is: interconnected, uncertain, and deeply entangled. This dissertation presents Designing for Entangled Speculation (DES), a framework that integrates conceptual resources from quantum entanglement—superposition, observer effect, interconnectedness, and nonlocality & nonlinearity—to expand the theoretical and methodological capacity of design speculation. Using a modified Research through Design (RtD) approach, I conducted three investigations representing varied configurations of abstraction, situatedness, and stakeholder expertise. Post(-)human Hazmat explored speculative narrative as a means of interrogating multispecies relationality. Speculative F/Actors: Climate Futures operationalized collaborative material speculation to model climate-related system interactions. Entangled Justice convened practitioners and researchers with diverse expertise from domains including circular economy, marine energy, and climate migration to generate shared knowledge and ignorance maps through structured collaborative inquiry. A diffractive, cross-case analysis demonstrates how quantum entanglement concepts shape the dynamics of speculative engagement, influence participants’ reasoning about complex systems, and foreground ethical and epistemic considerations within design processes. Together, these contributions position DES as an ethically attuned framework for opening design to more speculative and accountable engagements with the complexities of an entangled world.