What Would Margaret Atwood Do? Designing for Ustopia in HCI

Utopia and dystopia can be seen to exist within each other. What is a desirable future for one might put someone else in an uncomfortable or conflicted position. Speculative design serves as a tool to let people experience situations through different perspectives of criticality. This paper argues to use speculative methodologies to design for Ustopia. We consider different perspectives from Margaret Atwood’s novels “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Testaments”, and use these to define different critical perspectives that speculative design and speculative designers could take to pave the way to Ustopia. We present pastiche scenarios to illustrate how the perspectives could be applied to a transition that impacts all of us: the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines. We use these pastiche scenarios and related work from the field of speculative design as examples to illustrate how the different perspectives might be integrated into one speculative experience. We propose that Ustopia can be used to harness and encompass such complexity.