Speculative Lenses of Anthropomorphism - IIT Guwahati

The NonSense Bazaar workshop at IIT Guwahati marked a pivotal moment in extending speculative and more-than-human design practices into academic spaces in India. Hosted as part of the Ishanya 2025 design festival, this one-day session invited students to step beyond human-centred approaches and embrace design as an act of relational thinking and ecological care.

Participants, predominantly from design and allied fields, engaged in quick, playful exercises that encouraged them to embody non-human personas such as rivers, urban foxes, and fungi networks. Through activities like speculative persona building, future world mapping, and headline writing, students explored the roles and rights of non-human entities within imagined futures.

The workshop introduced concepts such as Tentacular Thinking and speculative world-building, providing a space for participants to question the human exceptionalism deeply embedded in traditional design education. By the end of the day, groups presented provocative future artefacts and narratives — from policy drafts proposed by pigeons to speculative communication systems designed by river ecosystems.

A special thanks to the student organising committee at IIT Guwahati for embracing such an unconventional topic, and to Dilipkumar Natarajan for his critical role in making this collaboration possible. The workshop demonstrated the potential of speculative design as a tool for expanding empathy, fostering ecological responsibility, and inspiring radical imagination among emerging designers.