SPECULATIVE PROTOTYPING
This course explores how wearable design can tell stories, shape performance, and express identity in virtual and hybrid realities. Students will experiment with 3D scanning, AI visualization, motion capture, and digital prototyping to create speculative wearables that challenge how we see the body and its environment.
Students will research themes such as nature, digital worlds, the future, identity, radical hope, and infrastructure. Working collaboratively, they will design and present an interactive final performance that reimagines the connection between body, media, and digital space
Throughout the semester, the class will collaborate with Speculative Designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who will join us for lectures, discussions, reviews, and final performances.
Dunne & Raby are a renowned design partnership known for pioneering Critical Design and Speculative Design, using design to question technological and social futures, rather than just solving problems. Through design projects and writing, they explore how speculative thought from science, philosophy, and literature can inform and expand design practice.
Their books include Not Here, Not Now (2025), Speculative Everything (2013), Design Noir (2001 / 2021), and Hertzian Tales (1999).
We should not design for likely futures, but for futures worth living in.
The course is a collaboration between the Industrial Design and Media Arts, Design and Technology (MADTech) departments at North Carolina State University’s College of Design. Industrial Design Assistant Teaching Professor Yuanqing (Ching) Tian and MADTech Assistant Teaching Professor Jedidiah Gant are leading the course with help from PhD student Sara Fisher and Graduate student Trace Thompson.
Ching’s research primarily focuses on the design of custom-fit wearable products, utilizing parametric design methods, 3D scanning technologies and digital fabrication tools. Her areas of interest include wearable design innovation, AI and emerging technologies, health and wellness, and mass customization.
Jedidiah is a designer, professor, and optimist with 28 years of design experience spanning architecture, media, branding, public art, and design education. Currently teaching classes in media theory, virtual production, artificial intelligence, thesis documentation, and design thinking.
“Design is only interesting when it confronts the impossible.”
– Rem Koolhaas (OMA)
Additional support for the course is provided by Industrial Design Department Head Audrey Barnes and MADTech Interim Department Head Tania Allen.
The Speculative Design course is a part of the Duda Paine Visiting Designer Program, which brings prominent design professionals and organizations into the College of Design curriculum. The program is supported by a fund set up by Linda and Turan Duda, FAIA in 2021.