WhatIF Lab: Wicked Thinking

Futuristic city
Image: Adobe Stock

Wicked Thinking is a zine created by Dr Skye Doherty that aims to shape a better future. It publishes future-dated news, online and in print, about the world's big challenges and what we could do to address them.

Wicked Thinking fuses design, journalism and research to shape fictions we call speculative news – stories that envision alternative social futures in a way that accounts for people, power, politics and the systems that structure our societies.

Some of these futures are utopian, some are dystopian, and some are mundane. The aim is not to predict the future but to provoke readers to construct a better one.

Approach

Wicked Thinking collections are informed by research. We use interviews, observations, literature surveys and creative workshops to understand issues and generate ideas about how to respond.

The speculative news stories are neither fact nor fiction — they occupy a middle ground, where imagination melds with reality.

Sometimes stories are part of larger, collaborative projects, other times they are independent, creative compositions.

Impact

Wicked Thinking collections have tackled the futures of energy, forced migration and bushfire, among other themes.

Individual stories are published online, collections are printed in a small-format zine. The UQ Library holds digital versions.

Follow the project here.