I learned about the method of "Silent conversation" from fem_arc collective. It is a practice that used in workshops or other participatory activities to give voice to everyone who is in the room.

Due to individual specifics and socialization a lot of people feel uncomfortable when they need to talk in front of a big group of people. Therefore, it creates at workshops a group dynamics where only few people feel free to share their opinions on a given subject. "Silent conversation" allows to engage with the audience on a different level, where each participant has an opportunity to contribute to the discussion.

The practice itself can vary:

1. It could be one big piece of paper with one question written in the center and then each participant finds a place there to write their answers;
2. Each participant could receive individual piece of paper with a question (questions could be the same or different on each paper) and write their answer. Then the paper can be passed to the next participant who can reflect on the same question or comment on the answer of the previous respondent. 

In many cases this practice can be considered feminist and inclusive because it is aware of group dynamics that can be intimidating. However, this practice assume that everyone in the room is comfortable with handwriting which also could not be the case. The main idea is to be sensitive to the individual needs during your workshops.

Critical mapping is a method that helps to understand how power relations works on the ground, to see the unequal distribution of city services or recourses, to examine geographical and spatial production processes.

It emerged as an opposition to understanding maps as objective representation of reality. Critical mapping allows to view maps as a tool of colonial practice and repurpose it to reveal social inequalities reflected in space. Moreover, Critical mapping can be use to speculate about the future of urban fabric and imagine new social-spatial power relations.
Critical mapping is often used as a participatory practice that includes representation not only of physical environment, but also of emotional and individual perception of city.

The example of the feminist critical mapping is the project fem*MAP Berlin 2049.

This method could be used as a participatory practice to explore how different bodies interact with digital information in the city. For example, surveillance cameras, QR codes on posters, automated bike/scooter renting services, social media accounts that are connected with the place etc.

“The participants of the the walk takes one of the following roles:

• a navigator, who chooses the path to walk;
• a photographer, who captures evidence of data as defined and understood by the group;
• a map-maker, who documents the path traveled and the important elements encountered along the way;
• a note-taker, who notes observations of the space;
• a collector, who identifies a significant object to bring back (and in some versions of the walk, this person also interacts with the online world, following bots or identifying social media information being created about the locations of the walk)”

This method belongs to the long tradition of walking and observing the city through psychogeography. It is a critical approach to smart city infrastructures that reveals inequality in space (for example, you have to have a smartphone or you feel that you are the target of the surveillance cameras)

Authors: Alison Powell
More info: link

Speculative design is a research tool that helps to imagine different scenarios of the future. The main idea of speculative design is to ask questions and be critical to the way we produce phenomena, products, types of governance, social relations, relations with non-humans etc. It works not only with future scenarios but also with the past as well. With thought-provoking experiments, speculative design can create an alternative present by imagining if some events in the past did not happen.

Imagining these scenarios is useful because we can follow the aftermath of the idea implementation and speculate how a new product, idea or protocol would change everyday interactions and what are the positive and negative effects of it. Speculative design does not work with utopia or dystopia (the example of speculative design dystopia is a series “Black mirror”). It is provocative and cannot be easily colored in black or white color.

More info: Book “Speculative everything”