Toward speculation otherwise: Correspondence and contamination in design engagements with urban renewal

This paper explores speculation otherwise by tracing how speculative
potential emerges from the very 5rst encounters of design research. Rather than
viewing speculation as a designer-led projection of possible futures, we propose a shift toward understanding speculation as something to be recognized within already unfolding worlds. Drawing on Tsing’s notion of contamination and Ingold’s concept of correspondence, we show how design engagements evolve through entanglements with speculartive forces circulating in the everyday: through material residues, infrastructural rhythms, social negotiations, and more-than-human relations. Through slow alignments, tentative invitations, failed funding applications and walks through neighbourhood sites, we describe how our own imaginaries became entangled with worlds of urban transformation. We argue that what is often framed as a pre-project
phase is already a site of speculative formation. Speculation otherwise thus positions design as attuned participation in unfolding situations, engaging not by projecting futures, but by corresponding with speculative possibilities already in motion.