Speculating the Past: Recovering Ford-Nucleon through Counterfactual Archives to Open the Possibilities of Nuclear Energy

Speculating the Past: Recovering Ford-Nucleon through Counterfactual Archives to Open the Possibilities of Nuclear Energy

Speculative design has long focused on exploring possible scenarios from the present, while the past has often been overlooked due to its implicit equivalence with known history. This study allows speculative design to engage with the past, taking the unrealized thing as the pivot for counterfactual speculation. The research invited the public to recover the Ford Nucleon through counterfactual history and create alternative nuclear archives. The goal is to extend the hidden possibilities in nuclear history and stimulate public discourse around nuclear possibilities. The findings show that grounding speculation in real historical events is identified as a key feature of speculative design that engages with the past. And thought experiments anchored in every counterfactual node helped participants explore the potential possibilities of nuclear energy. This study argues that counterfactual history as a design approach to speculating the past, is neither purely historical fantasy nor solely based on technical inference, but instead combines both to inquire into possibilities and values that extend from the past into the futures.

Keywords: counterfactual speculation; speculative design; alternative history; designing futures

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Won the Best Paper Award in IASDR 2025 - design futuring track