How art and speculative design breaks down digital barriers

Cyber security education is facing a fundamental challenge: how do you make the invisible visible? 

It’s a topic riddled with confusing jargon and invisible threats. But what if art and design could make it more tangible and relatable? 

Joe Bourne, a PhD researcher at Lancaster University, Partnership Lead at the Alan Turing Institute and former youth and community worker, is using speculative design to do just that. His work bridges the gap, helping everyday people explore cyber security through creativity, making and imagination. 

From fuel poverty to fictional futures

Bourne’s journey into speculative design began in community work. While supporting families experiencing fuel poverty during the UK’s smart meter rollout, he noticed how people asked questions about the technology being imposed on them: Does it have a camera? Is it listening to me? Who owns the data? 

“I became really interested in the power dynamics involved in technology where you have marginalised people and communities,” Bourne said. 

This curiosity led him to a research fellowship with PETRAS, a UK-based Internet of Things (IoT) cyber security network. There, he began experimenting with speculative design – commissioning exhibitions, writing fiction, and creating immersive experiences that invited people to imagine and interrogate possible futures. 

What is speculative design?

Speculative design is a creative practice that uses fictional scenarios, prototypes, and performances to explore future possibilities. It’s not about predicting the future, but provoking thoughts and conversation about alternative futures, which can then in-turn be used to examine the present. 

“I was into speculative design a long time before I realised I was,” Bourne said.  

As a teenager, he was drawn to architectural models and fantastical illustrations – works that imagined worlds not yet built. Later, working with researchers like Paul Coulton and Naomi Jacobs, he discovered design fiction as a method for engaging the public in cyber security. 

Rather than presenting facts or warnings, speculative design creates props that invite people to respond emotionally and intellectually.  

“You’re making something tangible,” Bourne said. “You can point at it and ask people about it.”  

The power of making things tangible  

Cyber security is abstract. Bourne describes it as “one of the most intangible subject areas,” which makes it hard to engage non-experts. His solution? Let people imagine how cyber threats might manifest in their own lives. 

“A lot of the time when we talk to non-cyber security experts about cyber security, we make the mistake of focusing on cyber security, instead of talking about how it's actually going to manifest as harms in their life.”   

One example comes from workshops with older adults in Edinburgh, delivered in collaboration with theatre company Civic Digits and The Making Rooms. Concerned about voice automation and cognitive decline, participants designed a device that could reword voice commands in their own voice – a domestic deepfake machine. It was a creative response to a real concern, and ironically, it reinvented the light switch. 

“It is very easy for us all to fall into all the same design traps,” Bourne laughs. “Technological solutionism, starting with the tech rather than the need.”  

But that’s the point, Bourne said: by becoming designers, participants empathised with the challenges of design itself. 

Other projects included speculative signage for smart lamp posts, AI-monitored public toilets, and fictional parking schemes, sparking conversations about privacy, surveillance, and trust.  

Theatre, walks, and public provocations 

Bourne’s work often blends speculative design with theatre and public engagement. In the Edinburgh workshops, older adults were supported to write and perform scenes involving their imagined technologies. The performances explored both harms and benefits, turning abstract concerns into lived experiences. 

“For me it’s the process,” he said.   

“I don’t really care too much about what we’ve built at the end of it. It’s much more about the conversation that it elicits and the process of making.”   

Another initiative involved walking tours with local residents, encountering real and fictional IoT devices in their towns. Participants speculated about the purpose of mysterious boxes on lamp posts, debated who controlled the data, and imagined AI systems deciding who was a threat. 

“We wouldn’t reveal whether it was true or false until the end,” Bourne said. “People would say, ‘I hope it’s this,’ or ‘I think it’s that.’” 

Bridging disciplines and building empathy 

One of Bourne’s core goals is to bring technologists, designers, and the public into conversation. While that’s logistically challenging, speculative design offers a workaround: portable artifacts and performances that can travel between spaces. 

He’s taken these works to cyber security conferences and design festivals.  

“I’ve never done a piece of work where it’s just been me,” he said.  

“I’m always keen to find people who say, ‘That’s interesting. Can we collaborate?’” 

Speculative design lends itself to a participatory approach and fosters empathy – not just from technologists toward users, but vice versa.  

“It’s a process of meeting in the middle. Finding language that’s in the middle, considering the challenges that are in the middle.” 

A call to imagine together 

As cyber security becomes more embedded in everyday life, Bourne’s work shows that speculative design isn’t just a tool for artists – it’s a method for anyone to explore, question, and shape digital futures. 

“If you use a bit of creativity, if you lean into some of the ambiguity, let people use their imaginations, talk about futures, these are all really good ways of opening people up about cyber security, privacy, just questioning harms of technology,” Bourne said.   

• Joe Bourne is currently completing his PhD on speculative design and cyber security at Lancaster University. 

The UNSW Institute for Cyber Security, in collaboration with UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, is running a competition asking creative practitioners, designers, technologists, storytellers, and speculative thinkers to explore what cyber security might become – and what it should become – in a world where trust in technology is impossible.  

“IFCyber Design Award 2025/2026: Cyber Security Futures” requires creatives to design a speculative future artefact, service, system, story or scenario that explores the future of cyber security in an untrusted world. Find out more.