ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the speculative practices of a team of interaction designers engaged in identifying and defining a novel healthcare technology to support the management of type-2 diabetes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the organizational context of a multinational microprocessor manufacturer, the chapter describes how an ‘in-home’ interview conducted with an elderly man managing type-2 diabetes resourced ‘ideation’ within a ‘brainstorm’ session. Whereas the profusion of literature on creativity attributes the production of novelty to the cognitive capacities of individuals – acting alone or in groups – Whitehead’s generic version of creative processes is worked with to describe how the ‘event’ of the brainstorm operated to curtail and constrain the extensiveness of speculation. Taking brainstorming as a speculative method, it is shown how there was both an attempt to access the not-as-yet ‘useful’ or instrumental whilst systematically removing, occluding or screening out other more non-sensical, troubling or uncomfortable implications, such as extraterrestrial implants, aimless disease mismanagement or the affects of grieving for a long-term partner lost to cancer. In other words, the speculative – idiotic or parasitic – dimensions of their ‘data’ were ‘neutralized’ by the very speculative practice of their methodology. This was analysed by way of the ‘what’ of a brainstorm event, where the problem addressed by the method is pre-ordained, and the ‘how’ of a brainstorm event, where the ways in which elements derived from the interview is considered, notably mediated by the material properties of post-it notes, failed to enter into the eventuation of the brainstorm. The chapter ends by speculating on the limits and parameters of speculation.
