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In an era where technology increasingly blurs the boundaries between humans and machines, artifacts have become crucial mediums for critically examining the technological, social, and ethical dimensions of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). This study explores artifacts as a key yet underutilized medium for speculation in the evolving field of HCI from a systemic perspective. While artifacts increasingly enable HCI to move beyond optimizing user experiences towards critically and collaboratively envisioning futures, perspectives comprehensively examining artifacts across the speculative design process and their impacts remain limited. Through a literature review of 53 speculative artifacts within the scope of HCI, this research elucidates the roles of artifacts across intention, making, and impact. Four categories of speculative artifacts emerged—Reflective, Exploratory, Interventional, and Heuristic—demonstrating how artifacts employ material, ambiguous, functional, and provocative forms to shape experiences, behaviors, and social norms. This study highlights the need for HCI to increasingly recognize the capacity of artifacts to support critical, sustained, participatory speculation by providing tangible representations of alternative futures. Speculative artifacts thus serve as powerful mediums to engage in societal discourse around the ethics and values of emerging technologies and to envision and enact responsible innovation. The materialization of alternative futures through artifacts allows researchers to reimagine socio-technological relationships, pushing design into inclusive, controversial spaces where diverse stakeholders can collaboratively shape desired and undesired futures.

What does more-than-human mean? How can we, as humans, understand that our ecology is only one of the many that do exist within the world? Furthermore, in which way should we step aside to let all ecological actors exercise their agency? And, more specifically, what should be the role of design and designers in tackling complex issues and in contributing to a major shift in thoughts? These questions fostered a reflection on the relation between possible futures and the design practice itself and set the basis for the creation of a provotype. A provotype (from “provocation” and “prototype”) is a conceptual product or an artifact whose objective is to foster reflections and provoke discussions mainly concerning social and environmental sustainability, innovations, and technologies, leaving gaps to be filled with the audience imagination.The research reported in this contribution deals with issues and questions that fall under the umbrella of the topic of alternative biopolitics in future scenarios: how can we co-design with more-than-human actors? In which way can symbiosis between different entities be achieved? What is the meaning of interspecies justice, and which should be the steps to follow to fulfill it? And, finally, maybe the most significant question to focus on: how can communication between different entities be fostered? The designed provotype consists of a fictional event (“The first Multispecies Symposium”) which takes place in 2100, further helped the researchers in opening new reflections that made it possible to experiment with participatory design and to finalize a tool that can be used to share and expand reflections about futures without hierarchies, not human-centered, sustainable progress and hope, participative futures.

What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we argue that if we fail to address intelligent things as objects that deserve moral consideration by their relations within a broad social context, we will lack a grip on the distinct ethical rules governing our interaction with intelligent things, and how to design for it. We report insights from a workshop, where we take seriously the perspectives offered by intelligent things, by allowing unforeseen ethical situations to emerge in an improvisatory manner. By giving intelligent things an active role in interaction, our participants seemed to be activated by the artifacts, provoked to act and respond to things beyond the artifact itself—its direct functionality and user experience. The workshop helped to consider autonomous behavior not as a simplistic exercise of anthropomorphization, but within the more significant ecosystems of relations, practices and values of which intelligent things are a part.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale has gained relevance in recent years due to the popularity of the series adaptation by showrunner Bruce Miller. The genesis of the novel is tightly bound to the sociopolitical context in which it was conceived in the 1980s while the show was released just a few months after Donald Trump’s election, both contexts marked by the looming threat of the limitation of access to safe abortion. The aim of this article is to analyze The Handmaid’s Tale as a cultural artifact that transcends the fictional realm and has spilled into the real world by inspiring a global protest movement against restrictions on reproductive rights. While the handmaid protest movement has garnered media attention, its articulation and effectiveness present limitations.

In 2017, fantasy author Alexandra Rowland posted a message on Tumblr: “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.” Obligingly, the internet did just that, describing everything from The Great British Bake Off to Jon Snow (though not Game of Thrones, the book and TV series in which he’s a character) as hopepunk. Such cultural artifacts were held up as proof that, as Rowland later elaborated, caring fiercely about something—anything—is an act of bravery and revolution in and of itself.The concept of hopepunk caught on with readers of science fiction and fantasy especially: they were worn out by stories of relentless evil and destruction. Instead, they wanted tales in which the good guys push back and, preferably, win. Over the next few years, amid political and social upheaval, the popularity of stories about caring and fighting for a better world grew.

My comment on Ethics in an Age of Technology, volume 2 of Ian G. Barbour's Gifford Lectures, acknowledges the excellence of Barbour's depictions of the social‐cum‐technological problems facing humanity in the coming millennium. Barbour's proposed solutions, too, are reasonable—but usually presuppose fundamental reforms in social values, especially within the powerful industrialized societies. Without further analysis of technology and values, this seems to make such solutions “impossible dreams.” My thesis is that clear analysis of the ideal aspects of technology (as itself the embodiment of knowledge and values), plus clues from Alfred North Whitehead on the dynamics of social change, can reinforce hope even in “impossible” dreams. First, technology, though embodied in solid material machinery and powerful social institutions, is no more “solid” than constant reaffirmation of the values behind it (as was the case with the Berlin Wall). Second, great ideals, over time, have the power to help create the conditions of their own possibility. Social change is both “pushed” by coercive forces (e.g., climate changes) and “pulled” by great values (e.g., human dignity). Therefore there are practical benefits to be gained from attending to, and celebrating, even currently “impossible” dreams as they work to make themselves possible.

The outcome of All Cherri's residency at the Gallery in 2021, the five cabinets in the exhibition 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?', 2022, were three-dimensional translations of images of the 'wounds' suffered by paintings in the collection that had been attacked by visitors, a part of their history that is rarely made visible. Cherri sleeps (lightly) in a gallery watched over by Egyptian mummies in glass cabinets or he wanders through the buildings, torch in hand, like a museum guard whose vigilance is not to secure the objects but to probe their mystery. Only the artist, his body like a seismograph, feels these tremors, his presence inferred by the handheld camera that tracks along a forest path to the sound of breathing; Cherri only enters the frame in the film's final sequence, the camera resting on an image of petrified crows spread-eagled on tree tops. The film premiered at Cannes in 2022 and was in production at the same time as Cherri's contribution to the 2022 Venice Biennale, the three-channel video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud, for which he won the Silver Lion for Promising Young Participant.