Abstract
With children’s increasingly entangled relationships with technology, it is imperative for them to critically explore, reflect on, and envision how technology impacts them and society at large, now and in the future. We conducted a speculative filmmaking workshop with 9-10-year-old school children where participants worked in groups to envision the future of human-machine relationships, creating stop-motion animations showcasing their imagined futures. Analysis of the films highlights unexpected explorations of conflicts involving nature, alongside anticipated human-machine dynamics. These reveal children’s expectations for humans and machines and their roles and responsibilities. Our work showcases how speculative filmmaking with children scaffolds critical explorations of the future of human, machine, and nature relationships.
Keywords
Speculative filmmaking; Human-machine relationships; Children and design futuring
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1089
Citation
Sharma, S., Norouzi, B., Ventä-Olkkonen, L., Kinnula, M., Nevala, T., Monga, C.,and Haarjärvi, T.(2025) Speculative Filmmaking with Children: Envisioning the Future of Humans, Machines, and Nature, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1089
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 2 - Design Futuring
Speculative Filmmaking with Children: Envisioning the Future of Humans, Machines, and Nature
With children’s increasingly entangled relationships with technology, it is imperative for them to critically explore, reflect on, and envision how technology impacts them and society at large, now and in the future. We conducted a speculative filmmaking workshop with 9-10-year-old school children where participants worked in groups to envision the future of human-machine relationships, creating stop-motion animations showcasing their imagined futures. Analysis of the films highlights unexpected explorations of conflicts involving nature, alongside anticipated human-machine dynamics. These reveal children’s expectations for humans and machines and their roles and responsibilities. Our work showcases how speculative filmmaking with children scaffolds critical explorations of the future of human, machine, and nature relationships.