Speculative design courses produce a lot of ideas that never go anywhere. That is not a failure of the form — it is the point. The value is in the generating, the articulating, the moment of writing something down and discovering whether it has enough internal logic to survive a sentence. Some of these went further than others. All of them are mine (some inspired from external sources), and here they are.

The second of three speculative design concepts from VIS 161, spring 2022. The term "synthetic sensing" is mine. The ideas came first; the rationale followed, as it often does. The premise was straightforward enough to sketch in a few sentences, which is usually a sign that the idea is either very simple or very large. This one turned out to be the latter. Synthetic sensing, as I conceived it, is the use of AR and VR technology to extend human perception beyond its current ph