Methodology

This page collects the methodological foundations, ethical posture, and structural framing devices of Hamilton 2092. It gathers material that lives alongside the Artist Statement but belongs in a more sustained, reference-style treatment: the five frameworks the project draws on, the limits of non-Indigenous speculative practice, the choices behind the thesis form, the letter form, the unresolved closing question, and the extraction problem the speculation cannot resolve.

Five Methodological Frameworks

This project draws on five interlocking methodological frameworks. Each is introduced briefly in the Artist Statement; this section treats them as the working method rather than a summary.

Discursive Design

Bruce and Stephanie Tharp: Design that privileges discourse over utility. The provotypes in this project are not products to be used but artifacts to be argued about. They are designed to provoke questions, not solve problems. The measure of a discursive object is whether it makes the conversation richer, not whether it ships.

The Futures Cone

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby: A framework for mapping possible, plausible, probable, and preferable futures. Hamilton 2092 inhabits the space between “plausible” and “preferable”: a future that is not predicted but proposed. The cone is used here as an orientation tool rather than a trajectory forecast.

Research through Design

Knowledge production through the act of making. The project, the provotypes, and the exhibition are not illustrations of prior research; they are the research itself, generating insights that could not have emerged from analysis alone. What the objects know is what the argument knows.

Indigenous Stewardship Principles

Particularly the Seven Generations Principle and the concept of reciprocal relationship with land. These are not metaphors borrowed for aesthetic effect; they are governance philosophies that offer concrete alternatives to extractive urban planning. They are held here with care and at a distance appropriate to the author’s position outside the traditions that carry them.

Diegetic Prototyping

The creation of artifacts that belong to the fictional world itself. The Multi-Lens, the Orenda Coil, and the OrgoBots are not props about Hamilton 2092; they are objects from Hamilton 2092, presented as if recovered from the future. The artifact precedes the explanation; the explanation catches up.

A Note on Indigenous Knowledge

This work was made by a non-Indigenous author on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, lands covered by the Dish With One Spoon Treaty and the Between the Lakes Treaty (Treaty 3). The governance philosophies it draws on, including the Seven Generations Principle, the concept of reciprocal stewardship, and the understanding of land as a living relation rather than a resource, are real. They belong to those nations. They are not metaphors.

The speculative voices used in this project to represent those traditions are necessarily incomplete. I am an outsider to these knowledge systems, and the fictional world I have built, however carefully researched, cannot fully represent perspectives that emerge from lived, ceremonial, and intergenerational experience. Writers such as Kim TallBear and adrienne maree brown explicitly model this posture of acknowledged limitation. Naming what you do not know, and what you cannot speak for, does not weaken the work. It strengthens it by being honest about its limits.

This project is offered not as a claim to Indigenous knowledge but as a gesture of solidarity with its principles, and an invitation for those who hold that knowledge to critique, correct, and extend what is imagined here.

On the Thesis Project

This project originated as an Honours Thesis project at Sheridan College’s Faculty of Animation, Arts & Design, by Alejandro Hernandez Guzman, class of 2026. It was imagined in a city still figuring out what it wanted to become.

The project used the methods of discursive design: speculative artifacts, fictional institutions, diegetic documents. It asked what Hamilton, Ontario, might look like if it took its own best impulses seriously across ten generations. The project is not a prediction. It is a provotype: a provocative prototype, an object designed to provoke thought about what is possible and what is worth wanting.

The Hamilton described in these pages does not exist. But the Hamilton that inspired it does: a city of steelworkers and artists, of escarpment trails and harbour remediation plans, of contested LRT projects and salmon returning to creeks where they had not been seen in a century. The distance between the real Hamilton and the speculative one is not as far as it might seem. It is the distance between what a city is and what it could choose to become, if enough people cared enough to try, for long enough, across enough generations.

That distance is the thesis.

On the Letter Form

The choice of a letter, written by a fictional Seventeenth Generation to an unknowable Eighteenth, is a diegetic framing device. It allows the epilogue to do something that conventional speculative fiction rarely attempts: to speak from within a future rather than about it. The letter does not describe Hamilton 2292 from the outside, as a reporter or historian might. It addresses a reader from the inside, as a citizen writing to the next generation. This shift from third person to second person, from description to address, is intentional. It transforms the reader from an observer into a participant: someone being spoken to, someone who bears responsibility for what comes next.

The letter form also carries the project’s central tension forward to its furthest point. Throughout seven chapters, this project has oscillated between practical instruction and speculative imagination, between the Hamilton that exists in 2026 and the Hamilton that might exist in 2092. The letter extends that oscillation by another two centuries, into territory where the speculative becomes genuinely uncertain. The Seventeenth Generation does not know what the Eighteenth will become. The letter does not resolve. It asks.

On the Unresolved Question

The epilogue’s final question, “What will you become?”, is left deliberately unanswered. This is a structural choice: design for the future should open questions rather than close them. The letter does not answer, because answering would foreclose the possibilities it is trying to hold open.

The question is also, quietly, addressed to the reader in 2026. What will you become? What will your city become? The distance between 2026 and 2292 is the same distance the question asks you to hold: long enough to be uncertain, short enough to feel urgent.

A Note on Extraction

Building a world about ecological restoration means reckoning with what restoration cannot fix. The circular economy has answers: closed-loop steel, mycelial materials, localized energy. But every technological wonder still requires lithium, rare earths, complex nuclear elements. The gap between what we extract from the earth and what we return to it has not closed. It has only been redesigned. Perhaps the honest end goal of human ingenuity isn’t a perfect circular economy on this planet. It’s developing the capacity to leave Earth’s remaining resources untouched, to source what we need from elsewhere, and to call that stewardship. Hamilton 2092 imagines one piece of that arc. The rest stays open. Stay tuned.