Unflattening.
My undergraduate thesis project, where I attempt to create a framework to procedurally expand Indian Science Fiction into inhabitable context for speculative designers.
Observation
we import futures from the West
but we aren’t the West, so
Claim
we doom ourselves to a fate that isn't ours.
Problem
Four mandates run through design as it is dominantly practiced — the homogenization mandate, the fiction of neutrality, complicity in extraction, and the outsourced imagination. Downstream of them sit three crises: of imagination, of relevance, of agency. This is flattening.
Claim 01
Science Fiction is contextually critical.
Claim 02
Indian SF, rooted in a postcolonial, non-Western empirical environment, offers critique that is structurally unavailable in Western SCD.
Claim 03
We can use Indian SF narratives as sites for speculative design — and thereby unflatten.
Research Question
How can the latent design logics within Indian Science Fiction be formalized into a critical methodology for reimagining the practice, pedagogy, and purpose of design, generating culturally coherent alternatives to its global, homogenized present?
How does design manifest within each selected narrative — through what objects, interfaces or systems, and what do they imply about the world?
Theoretical Foundation
01Darko Suvin
Science Fiction
02Dunne + Raby
Speculative Critical Design
03Anne Marie Willis
Ontological Design
Method
Theory and practice run simultaneously, not in alternating steps: every chapter carries both the narrative work and the research grounding for it. Three stages come out of that — story analysis, profile making, brief making — read the world, read the designer that world produces, then commission from inside it.
Goal
01
Procedurally expanding Indian science fiction narratives into sites for critique through speculative design
02
Creating varied, unique and provocative contexts for designers, educators and students to develop the skill of inhabiting speculative realities and designing for them through repetition and practise in varied speculative scenarios.
Interested? Check out the full document. It’s a fun read!