ABSTRACT This paper provides a pedagogic context for the authors’ concept of ‘Speculative Pasts,’ framed within an auto-ethnographic account of their co-taught course ‘How the Computer Became Personal.’ Blending disciplinary methodologies from historical practice and speculative and critical design, the Speculative Pasts assignment asks students to create primary documents from a hypothetical historical scenario related to an aspect of American personal computing history. This paper lays out the disciplinary contexts and development process for working across design and history disciplines, curricular organization, assignment process, and offers analysis of examples from student work. Additionally, this paper details how ‘Speculative Pasts’ offer a critique of the narrowness and problematic futurism of ‘speculative futures.’ Altogether, the authors offer this course and its primary project as a model for making history essential, rather than supplementary, to design and for leveraging practice-based production as a valued mode of historical inquiry.

中文翻译：

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“投机的过去”教学法：投机设计与历史思维相结合

摘要本文为作者的“投机性过去”的概念提供了教学背景，并以他们的共同志愿课程“计算机如何成为个人”的民族志描述为框架。推测过去的作业将历史实践与推测性和批判性设计中的学科方法相结合，要求学生根据与美国个人计算历史的某个方面相关的假设性历史情景创建主要文档。本文列出了跨设计和历史学科，课程组织，作业过程的学科背景和开发过程，并提供了学生工作实例的分析。此外，本文详细介绍了“投机性过去”如何对“投机性未来”的狭窄性和有问题的未来主义提出了批评。共，