I came into this semester wanting to take Afterlife further. The first seminar was where the project started, where I found that speculative and futuristic design is what I actually want to do. The second seminar was where it had to grow up.

The original instinct was the wrong one. I was trying to design a service. Something usable. Something that could one day be released as a product helping people deal with a digital life after death. Roman Sellner Novotný, my mentor for this semester, helped me see that this instinct was working against the project, not with it.

"Afterlife doesn't end with a product. It ends with a workshop that opens the door to the next conversation."

That single shift, from product to provocation, reframed everything I did this semester.

I went deeper into Afterlife than I had in Seminar 1. More research, more references, more time spent inside the concept rather than around it. I started reading speculative design not as a method but as a position, a way of asking what if without owing anyone an answer.

Once the framing changed, the deliverables changed. Instead of trying to finalise a service, I focused on building the artefacts a workshop needs to function. Provocations, scenarios, prompts that get people talking about the things speculative design is supposed to surface, the assumptions, the discomforts, the parts of the future we're not ready to look at directly.

The workshop happened, which is the part I'm most proud of. Roman pushed me to actually run it instead of leaving it on paper. That's a bigger leap than it sounds. A facilitated session forces you to stop polishing the concept and put it in front of people who will say things you didn't expect.

What participants brought to it was richer than what I had prepared for them. The conversation moved in directions I hadn't seen coming, which is exactly what speculative work is supposed to do. The workshop wasn't the end of Afterlife. It was the door I'd been trying to design my way around.

The deliverable in speculative design isn't the artefact. It's the conversation the artefact starts. I had been treating the concept as something that needed to be finished, when really it needed to be opened.

I also learned how much the right mentor changes a project. Roman didn't tell me to stop building. He told me what I was actually building, and let me catch up to my own work.

Afterlife isn't done. It probably shouldn't be. But it's now in a shape where it can keep generating discussion, which is the only kind of finished that matters in this kind of work.