Newspapers Do Work: Quick and Effective Entanglement Material for Speculation

This research is motivated by the increasing significance of situated and sketching activities to co-speculate alternative futures. Our purpose is to present newspapers as imaginary material and how they relate to rich speculation in domestic networked-objects with regard to the emerged entanglement experience. As most studies aim at providing representation of everyday life and imaginative triggers as entanglement material for speculation, this research focuses on the relationship between news headlines and evocative objects. We then explore how collaging and sketching with everyday objects, app-icon stickers together with the present and the past newspapers help to speculate the utopian, or dystopian worlds. Findings show that newspapers become an effective catalyst to slightly defamiliarize our daily life and break the inertial thinking. Based on the collages, we design speculative products that explore the diversity of the possible IOT futures. Finally, we present illustrative cases with interpretations and heuristic implications.