"All that You Touch, You Change": Expanding the Canon of Speculative Design Towards Black Futuring

Traditional approaches to technology design have historically ignored Blackness in both who engages and conceptualizes future technologies. Design contributions of groups marginalized along race and class are often othered, and rarely considered the design standard. While frameworks have emerged to encourage attention to gender and social justice in design, little work has acknowledged evidence of the Black imaginary in this process. The current canon of design defines futuring and speculation as stemming from a narrow view of science fiction, one which does not include Black futurist perspectives. In this essay, we expand the canon of design by arguing that frameworks such as Afrofuturism, Afrofuturist feminism, and Black feminism be considered instrumental in design’s imagining of our future technological landscape. We contribute to the larger conversation of who gets to future in design, suggesting a dialogic relationship between those who conceptualize design and those who consider design’s societal impact.