Many innovative software products are conceived, developed and deployed without any conventional attempt to elicit stakeholder requirements. Rather, they are the result of the vision and intuition of a small number of creative individuals, facilitated by the emergence of a new technology. In this paper we consider how the conditions that enable new products’ emergence might be better anticipated, making innovations a little less reliant on individual vision and a little more informed by stakeholder need. This is particularly important where a new technology would have the potential for social impact, good or bad. Speculative design seeks to explore this landscape. We describe a case study using a variant called design fiction to explore how plausible new technologies might impact on dementia care.