Speculative Futures

Prompt: In approximately 500 words, describe or narrate a scenario about a toy related to citizenship found a few years into a growth future in which “progress” has continued.

A few years into a future where “progress” has continued, the world looks different but familiar. Cities hum with renewable energy, schools are hybrid spaces of physical and digital learning, and children grow up surrounded by tools designed not only to entertain but to educate them about their place in society. Among these tools is a toy called CivicBlocks—a modular, interactive playset that has become a staple in homes and classrooms.

The Toy’s Concept

CivicBlocks is a set of colorful, smart blocks that children can snap together to build miniature communities. Each block represents a civic element:

• Blue blocks for public services like hospitals, schools, and libraries.
• Green blocks for parks, renewable energy stations, and recycling centers.
• Red blocks for governance—town halls, voting booths, and community centers.
• Yellow blocks for businesses and marketplaces.

Embedded sensors allow the blocks to “talk” to each other. When a child builds a town, the toy simulates how resources flow, how decisions are made, and how citizens interact. If a child forgets to add a school, the system gently prompts: “Your community needs a place for learning. Where should it go?”

The Scenario

In one classroom, a group of ten-year-olds gathers around a CivicBlocks set. Their teacher has asked them to design a city that balances fairness, sustainability, and opportunity. The children eagerly snap blocks together, debating where to place the hospital and how many parks their town should have.

One child, Maya, insists on building a large marketplace first. Another, Leo, argues that without a recycling center, the town will soon face waste problems. The toy responds dynamically: the marketplace block lights up, showing economic growth, but the absence of a recycling block triggers a warning about pollution.

The children laugh, negotiate, and rearrange their blocks. They learn that progress isn’t just about building more—it’s about building wisely, with attention to the needs of all citizens.

Lessons in Citizenship

The toy doesn’t lecture; it nudges. When the children add a voting booth, CivicBlocks simulates an election, showing how different policies affect their miniature society. They see that choosing more parks improves happiness but reduces tax revenue, while prioritizing businesses boosts growth but requires careful regulation.

Through play, they absorb lessons about:

• Responsibility: Every block matters; neglecting one part of society creates imbalance.
• Collaboration: Decisions are better when made together.
• Rights and Duties: Citizens have voices, but they also share obligations to keep the community thriving.

The Future Context

In this imagined future, toys like CivicBlocks are not just entertainment—they are cultural artifacts. They embody the idea that citizenship is learned early, not through textbooks alone but through lived, playful experience. Progress has continued, but it is measured not only in technology or wealth, but in how societies nurture empathy, cooperation, and civic responsibility in their youngest members.

Closing Image

As the classroom session ends, the children look proudly at their glowing city. It is imperfect, messy, and full of compromises—just like the real world. Yet in their laughter and negotiation lies the seed of a future where citizenship is not abstract, but tangible, built block by block in the hands of those who will inherit tomorrow.

Word count: ~505

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Reflecting on AI prompts is always an enjoyable exercise of mixed feelings. Anxiety is a dominant one, curiosity, and also sometimes a couple of laughs. The anxiety is rooted in how quickly it can produce “meh” results that are often passable; the curiosity and humour are born of seeing the algorithm do its thing and frequently convey bizarre information. If I were a high school student today, I would certainly lean heavily into it. I’ve used generative AI, such as Copilot, to help flesh out ideas for a few of my creative hobbies, including Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and garden bed ordering. This activity was undoubtedly more of a stretch on my creative juices than those.

As per Mitrovic et al (2017), “Speculative design, or any related design approach oriented towards the future, is to use it as a vehicle to approach complex societal and environmental challenges through design.” This implies that speculative design has uses beyond art and can be applied to real-world issues that affect quality of life. The production above, “CivicBlocks,” feels like a creation put forward by an ambitious MBA who has watched children play, but never engaged with it themselves. It’s reminiscent of the famous novel “The Giver” (1993) by Lois Lowry, a dystopian novel following an individual living in a society where what makes a person human has been purged through societal design, and the purpose of life is a utilitarian aim chosen by the hierarchies in place.

The outstanding impression I get from this toy CoPilot created to represent a future of growth and citizenship is its focus on traditional (capitalist) Western Hierarchies as central. If the children choose to play freely and differently, led by their imaginations, the toy corrects them: “No, you cannot have three playgrounds; you need space for the prison for those who break the law.” The focus of the toy is instilling communal values and power structures, but CoPilot deems them essential when constructed in a particular order and balance. What about homeschooling? Ivan Illich, who wrote the famed De-schooling Society (1971), and Lewis Mumford, who famously critiques the ecologies of technology-influenced hierarchies and their harm to the human spirit’s creativity (Mumford, 1955), would weep at the idea of presenting such toys to children.

So then, to step back and look at the process, this is the style of presentation for a speculative object created by an algorithm with hidden, unknown parameters. It is easy to see how “a huge useless class might appear, owing to both an absolute lack of jobs and a lack of relevant education and mental flexibility (Harai, 2017). The style of the output: point-form and short paragraphs, makes it digestible and easily referenceable, and the subheadings are relevant. Returning to the Mitrovic quote above, I think the narratives these tools create are near-useless when aiming to design for real-world impact. The cognitive offloading leads me to appreciate the tools’ crippling effect on critical thinking and the dehumanizing of the output. It cannot imagine; it can only parrot and compile.

References

Harari, Y. Reboot for the AI revolution. Nature 550, 324–327 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/550324a 

Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mitrović, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J., & Helgason, I. (Eds.) (2021). Beyond Speculative Design: Past – Present – Future. University of Split.

Mumford, L. (1955). Technics and Civilization. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.