Speculative Performance: Staging Intergenerational Speculation to Explore Critical Literacies of Technological Futures

This paper presents speculative performance as an approach for engaging participants in imagining, enacting, and reflecting on technological futures through a combination of speculative design, performance, and intergenerational engagement. While speculative and performance-based methods are well established in HCI, there has been limited exploration of how these practices might explore critical technological literacies across generations. To investigate this, we ran two five-day workshops with approximately 30 older adults and young people, who collaboratively created speculative artefacts and dramatic scenes of technological futures, which culminated in a final public performance. We demonstrate how speculative performance can foster critical literacies of digital technologies and data by enabling participants to embody technological issues, move from technological malfunction to social and relational implications, and imagine alternative futures. We reflect on the opportunities and challenges of speculative performance and argue that this methodological approach expands how HCI imagines, critiques and performs technological futures with intergenerational communities.