Design is, by nature, a discipline that works with imagination (Folkmann, 2010; Tully, 2012). Every act of design is, in some way, speculative, since a designer’s work consists of bringing abstract ideas to life, ideas that eventually materialize into physical reality (Auger, 2013; Ward, 2020).
When a designer is developing a product, digital or otherwise, they are constantly speculating about how that product will find its place in the world and in people’s lives (Auger, 2013). As Herbert Simon reminds us in The Sciences of the Artificial (1969), design is the discipline devoted to “shaping the artificial” that which does not exist naturally but emerges from human intention. Thus, the very act of designing is inherently speculative, concerned with conceiving what does not yet exist but could be brought into being.
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” — Herbert Simon
We are constantly working on beta versions of the products we develop. In digital product development, it is widely accepted that design is never…