OTHER
FUTURES
LAB
Speculative Design for
Plural and Provocative Futures
Research and Design Lab at
Iovine and Young Academy, USC
Designing Otherwise. Researching What’s Next.
Other Futures Lab is a design research lab at the Iovine and Young Academy, University of California. We explore alternative, critical, and speculative futures through design-led inquiry. Our work focuses on how design can illuminate systemic change, cultural values, and emerging technologies—not by predicting the future, but by making futures thinkable, discussable, and contestable.
Our work bridges design fiction, critical foresight, and participatory research. We investigate themes such as AI and aging, digital twins, ambient crafts, and speculative urbanism —through both conceptual exploration and tangible experimentation.
Founded by Professor Yihyun Lim, the lab is situated at the intersection of design strategy, cultural critique, and emerging technologies. Our methods are post-disciplinary, combining design research, speculative prototyping, and futures-oriented pedagogy.
Research Themes
We organize our research under thematic provocations. Each explores speculative trajectories across design, technology, culture, and society:
AI and Human Futures
Rethinking agency, explainability, and personality in human–AI interactions.
Speculative urbanism
Imagining infrastructures, migration, and reproductive technologies in future cities.
Craft & Code
Intersections of traditional making and ambient, computational futures.
Futures Pedagogy
Developing speculative education frameworks, research toolkits, and futures literacy interventions.
Our approach is hypothesis-driven and artifact-based. We use speculative prototyping, design fiction, and scenario testing to make futures discussable, contestable, and designable.