Speculative Design
Solo project, DESG315, FLAME University
A speculative design project imagining a 2041 commons community in Portugal, built in response to six converging structural crises: housing collapse, legal statelessness, climate migration, and more.
By 2041, six structural crises have converged (housing, legal statelessness, climate displacement among them) and The Grove is one answer: a commons community in Portugal built outside the systems that failed. "Mira's Nine Lives" is the character-driven narrative device I used to explore predictable, possible, and preferable futures for the people who'd actually live there, rather than designing the place in the abstract.
The quickest way in is the 2041 poster ↓, a single page that lays out the commons at a glance. The reasoning underneath it, from the six crises through to the final proposal, runs through the full presentation ↓.
Most of the project lives in the dossier, where The Grove gets its history, its governance, and its daily texture. I built it as an interactive dossier ↗ so it could be moved through rather than read straight down, and kept a document version ↓ for anyone who wants the whole thing in one sitting.
The community also had to exist as an object, so I built a tactile map of The Grove by hand: its land, its shared buildings, and the people moving through it. The full photo documentation ↓ covers the build and the details up close.
Speculative work gets convincing when you can pick things up and use them, so three of the deliverables are artefacts from inside The Grove rather than descriptions of it. The Grove Digital Twin ↗ models how the community's systems hold together. Soil Intelligence ↗ and the Inventory Checker ↗ are working tools a resident would actually open, which is what makes the place feel inhabited instead of illustrated.
The last piece is the one a new resident meets first: a welcome brochure ↓ written from inside The Grove, explaining how the commons works to someone who has just decided to opt out of everything else.