Specula is a strategic design method that uses futures as tools to build living, adaptive brand identities oriented toward preferable scenarios. Born from the intersection of speculative design, brand strategy, and generative artificial intelligence, it helps organizations and teams imagine possible worlds and transform those visions into decisions, prototypes, and operational narratives.
Traditional branding shows evident structural limitations: generic purposes, campaigns chasing ephemeral trends, identities consumed at the speed of feeds. The problem is primarily imaginative: many brands continue describing the present while their audience is already elsewhere, projected—consciously or not—into desired, feared, ambivalent futures.
Specula works precisely on this gap. The starting point is no longer "how do we position ourselves in today's market?" but "what futures do we want to help make possible?" From there, we work backward, designing identities, products, services, and AI agents that can operate in those futures without losing deep coherence.
The framework is designed to be:
- Speculative: Starts from multiple scenarios, not a single linear prediction
- AI-Assisted: Uses generative models to expand the field of possibilities, not to replace human judgment
- Values-Anchored: Structurally integrates explicit ethical DNA and a refusal policy
- Measurable: Includes impact indicators and review mechanisms from the start
- Evolutionary: Configures a continuous device (Specula Guardian) that monitors gaps between imagined future and emerging reality
Opening the field through multiple possible and desirable futures. Uses desk analysis, interviews, explorative sessions, and AI to analyze weak signals and unusual correlations, combining cultural, technological, economic, regulatory, and environmental drivers.
Analyzing competitors' speculative trajectories: not just present campaigns, but research investments, partnerships, emerging languages, narrative territories they're occupying. The goal is to find the "white spaces"—futures no one is credibly presiding over yet.
Excavating what must remain stable across multiple scenarios: radical values, worldview, forms of care, inviolable limits. Uses the Speculative Identity Model: a canvas working on six intertwined dimensions—radical values, persona/entity, agency, speculative interactions, preferable horizons, alternative tools and metrics.
Testing the brand in different futures through speculative design exercises, storytelling, service storyboards, narrative and conversational interfaces. Includes the Resilience Protocol: four stress-test scenarios (recession, regulatory revolution, technological discontinuity, plus a Wild Card black swan).
The Ethical Gate is a formal checkpoint asking:
- Does this scenario violate declared radical values?
- Does it introduce manipulative, extractive, or exclusionary practices?
- Does it create unacceptable technological, social, or environmental dependencies?
Rejected prototypes are logged in the Registry of Refusals—what the brand chose not to become.
Transforming the constellation of elements into coherent story systems capable of living across multiple time horizons. Produces adaptive narratives that can modulate depending on which scenario materializes, while keeping the core recognizable.
Exposing the preferable future hypothesis to dialogue with communities: customers, partners, suppliers, territories, activists. AI acts as a designed mediator to amplify significant divergences without transforming them into destructive polarization.
Translating work into concrete roadmap: projects, prototypes, releases, experiments, investments. Specula Guardian is a long-term accompaniment pact: monitoring the gap between imagined future and emerging reality, with an Emergency Re-Speculation Clause triggered when signals significantly diverge for two consecutive quarters.
- Ethical Framework: Gate structure, key questions, exclusion criteria, refusal typologies
- Templates: Registry of Refusals, Speculative Identity Canvas, Impact Measurement Framework
- AI Governance Principles: Responsible use guidelines, bias audit protocols, human-in-the-loop requirements
- Method Documentation: Phases, principles, application guidelines
- Documentation Index: Canonical map of all docs
- Method Agent Protocol: How to configure a Specula Method Agent for facilitated sessions
- Method Evolution Log: Progressive definition and change history of the method
- Schema Profiles: Conceptual JSON artifacts plus runtime-compatible JSON contracts
- Examples: Sample sessions and deliverables
- AI system configurations and prompt libraries
- Scenario libraries and research protocols
- Specific operational facilitation tools
- Client project work and case specifics
This balance between transparency and intellectual property allows Specula to position itself as a credible actor, not another opaque formula.
Specula Audit — Diagnostic focus (~2 weeks): Analyzes brand identity state, AI maturity, coherence between declared values and practices, resilience against key scenarios.
Specula Full Journey — Complete process (2-3 months): All six phases with mixed Specula/client team, producing documents, prototypes, roadmaps, and policies for robust decisions on identity, products, services, and AI systems.
Specula Guardian — Annual accompaniment: Quarterly monitoring of how scenarios are moving, which signals confirm or deny hypotheses, where fragility, incoherence, or unexpected opportunities are emerging.
- Start from the Documentation Index
- Review the Ethical Framework
- Explore the Templates directory
- Read AI Governance Guidelines
- Configure the Specula Method Agent for guided sessions (EN)
- Configura il Specula Method Agent per sessioni guidate (IT)
- Review the Runtime Alignment Guide
- Review the Method Evolution Log
- Review Examples for sample sessions and outputs
- Join Discussions to share learnings and challenges
- Review the Method Overview
- Explore Case Studies (anonymized)
- Understand the Investment Framework
- Contact us for an Audit or Full Journey engagement
- Read Contributing Guidelines
- Propose improvements to the ethical layer
- Share anonymized learnings from applications
- Help refine templates and tools
A space—physical and digital—where brands that have completed a Full Journey or are in Guardian process can periodically confront each other. Not a club of polished best practices, but a place for frank exchange about what it really means to stay true to preferable futures when short-term pressures push elsewhere.
Rigorous documentation of "before" and "after": starting metrics, changed decisions, transformed internal narrative, expected and unexpected effects. In later phases, activating collaborations with academic realities and research centers for longitudinal observation of method effectiveness.
Those bringing the method to other contexts must have personally gone through a training and supervision path, not just read a manual. This ensures minimal consistency in application while leaving room for variants, adaptations, contaminations.
Talking about the future doesn't mean predicting it, but taking responsibility for steering the present toward trajectories we consider desirable. Work on speculative identity isn't stylistic exercise—it's a form of care: for people working in brands, for communities that traverse them, for ecosystems that sustain them.
Brands are no longer just communication objects. They are actors participating in writing futures. The Specula Method exists to help them do it more consciously, more imaginatively, and more responsibly.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). See LICENSE.md.
Proprietary elements (AI configurations, scenario libraries, operational protocols) remain under copyright.
If you use, adapt, or build upon the Specula Method or the Specula Method Agent, you must clearly attribute the work to:
Marco Livi — Specula Method
https://github.com/oddtitoreal/specula-method
Attribution must be visible in documentation, presentations, and public materials. See ATTRIBUTION.md for full guidelines.
- Marco Livi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcolivi/
- Discussions: GitHub Discussions
- Email: tito@marcolivi.it
Version 1.0 — Last updated: February 2026