Speculative Stuff
2023 - 2024 - 2025 - 2026 Student Works
* The intellectual property rights of each work are owned by each student.

The Harmony System














SMIRTHA JEYAKRISHNAN, 2026










What if your social class was determined?


In 2045 Seoul, silence is no longer a personal choice but a social obligation. Citizens receive the Harmony System on their eighteenth birthday, marking their transition into adulthood. The system consists of paper masks and status necklaces that visibly display a person's Silence Score. 

Speaking causes masks to deteriorate. Citizens who maintain high scores earn access to higher social tiers represented by colored masks and necklace rings. Red citizens access only basic public services, while White citizens gain entry to elite districts and leadership spaces. 

What began as a tool for promoting harmony gradually became a system for regulating identity. 
The quieter a person becomes, the more opportunities they receive. In a society where everyone is rewarded for blending in, self-expression becomes a social risk. 


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Speculative Stuff



Speculative Stuff is a public archive of speculative design works developed through Yonsei University’s Integrated Design courses, 
led by Hyunjae Daniel Shin (Associate Professor) and Eun Sun Park (Lecturer).

The platform documents how undergraduate students begin with small everyday questions — discomforts, contradictions, awkward moments, and social habits we often overlook — and transform them into speculative objects, future scenarios, and critical narratives.

These works are not predictions of the future. They are invitations to look again at the present. By using comedy, exaggeration, absurdity, and preposterous worldbuilding, the projects make familiar systems feel strange and open up alternative ways of imagining technology, culture, society, and the environment.

The course has been shaped by an ongoing pedagogical exploration of Speculative Critical Design, combining futures studies, design research, interactive workshops, and public engagement. It encourages students to move beyond solution-driven design and develop more critical, imaginative, and participatory ways of engaging with alternative futures.

The methodological background of Speculative Stuff is further informed by Eun Sun Park’s doctoral research on the Preposterous Comedy Approach for Speculative Critical Design, which examines how comedy techniques, preposterous futures, and speculative artefacts can support critical thinking, public engagement, and future-oriented design education.

Read the dissertation HERE(EN) (KR)