Monika Lukowska-Appel
Contemporary ecological crisis challenges design practices grounded in representation, prediction, and control. Coastal erosion, biodiversity loss, and accelerating environmental change increasingly reveal ecological systems as dynamic, relational, and resistant to stable modelling. Such conditions require methods capable of working with uncertainty, distributed agency, and ontological plurality rather than reducing complexity into manageable variables. This paper proposes a speculative-generative approach as a systemic practice for engaging ecological complexity when systems exceed representation. Rather than treating generative artificial intelligence as a tool for optimisation, efficiency, or prediction, the paper positions AI as a creator of productive incoherence: a methodological condition in which ambiguity, distortion, and unresolved relations become generative sites for inquiry. The argument is developed through Speculative Ecologies, a creative practice research project produced for the Seven Forms exhibition in Geraldton, Western Australia. The project responds to ongoing coastal erosion on Yamatji Country through a process of material collection, AI transformation, and physical translation into print and sculptural forms. Shoreline fragments, including shells, seaweed, stones, and organic debris, become points of encounter through which ecological systems are approached not as objects to be represented but as assemblages of human and more-than-human agencies. Within systemic design, ecological systems are increasingly understood as emergent, relational, and inherently incomplete (Jones, 2021; Meadows, 2008). This paper argues that speculative-generative practice contributes to this discourse by offering a methodology that operates prior to intervention: not modelling systems for optimisation but creating conditions for attentiveness, ontological openness, and relational understanding.
Keywords: speculative design, ecology, pluriverse, generative AI, creative practice