Fluid Speculations: Drawing Artefacts in Watercolour as Experimentation in Research Through Design

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This pictorial paper presents design experimentations using drawing, watercolour and storytelling as forms of speculation about artefacts and technologies. The use of watercolour, a medium that bleeds and has leaky boundaries, allowed ambiguity, defamiliarization and critical reflection to enter the research space, encouraging new understandings of artefacts and their latent possibilities. Watercolour was also valuable for speculating about designs that deal with bodily fluids, and for Drawing Conversations that facilitated reinterpretations of artefacts through drawings created by two different people. Intersecting themes about cognition, creativity and technology, this pictorial presents examples that illustrate how watercolour drawing can impact on the representation of speculative concepts, including the creation of visual conversations. The drawings shown here are presented as representations embodying families of ideas and themes related to the objects they symbolize, together with the design spaces they suggest and the stories they invite us to imagine.