Participatory Design Futuring Visions Through a Social Practice Theory Lens

Participatory design futuring (PDF) often emphasizes process quality and participant learning while leaving the operational value of surfaced knowledge underspecified. Building on social construction of technology, this paper develops a social practice theory (SPT) lens to assess and comparatively discuss PDF through four dimensions: imagined practice, materials/technologies, competences, and meanings. We apply this lens to two of our PDF projects, an explorative XR/metaverse study in Japan and normative genAI dialogues across Nigeria, Germany, and Japan. Both projects foregrounded enhanced accessibility through technology as central meaning but revealed different qualities in their speculation: the metaverse artifacts provoke discursive, critical reflection on individual and collective agency, while the genAI dialogues produced strategic, actionable considerations with concrete requirements tied to local and individual needs. By showcasing how a comparative SPT-driven analysis surfaces distinct speculative qualities and operational outcomes, we offer an approach for expanding evaluations of the quality of speculation.