Speculating the Archive:  Research through Design with Incomplete Histories 

Abstract

This pictorial examines how Research through Design (RtD) can engage uncertainty, omission, and silence in historical datasets. Using an incomplete archive of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes region of North America, the project addresses gaps in archival records as well as forms of knowledge that are structurally excluded or held outside Western archival systems, particularly Indigenous watercraft used long before colonialism. We adopt a two-part RtD process that uses speculative data practices and temporal design: first, we construct a dataset that combines archival records with speculative and AI-generated images and text—not to recover missing histories or reconstruct data on behalf of communities, but to critically surface how such absences are produced, mediated, and what is at stake when they persist; second, we translate this hybrid dataset into two map-based artifacts that are designed to explore multiple, non-linear temporalities. These maps deliberately blur distinctions between archival and generated data, encouraging viewers to question what they are looking at. In doing so, they produce uncertainty and doubt as experiential qualities of artifacts often assumed to be factual and authoritative. We contribute to HCI by demonstrating how speculative data practices—treating archival silences as generative rather than corrective—can function as a form of temporal design by showing how multi-temporal maps can explore contingency, relationality, and contested historical knowledge.

Here is the full pictorial.