Designing Futures
by petermeAs Roland mentioned in an earlier post, last week we had a lunch time visit from Andrew Blau, the Global Business Network’s head of practice. It was a great talk, and the team started sketching all these ideas they had in relation to what was discussed.
GBN is best known for their scenario planning practice, wherein they work with a client to create a set of stories (usually 3 or 4) about the client’s business 10 years out. These stories are purposefully diverse, so that they can help the business prepare for any number of possible futures.
It made me think about the role of futures in our experience design work. Design is an inherently futurist activity — planning and sketching things that don’t yet exist. We’ve begun to engage directly with futurist notions in our work, whether it’s tangible futures (designing the poster that will trumpet our success), concept videos (what will it be like to interact with mobile devices in 3-5 years), prototypes, and more. What I realized is that, in our practice at least, our application of futures thinking pretty much stops 3-5 years out. I scrawled the following on a whiteboard, as I considered how our experience design work and GBN’s scenario planning work complements one another. Be warned, it’s barely half-baked!
I found myself wondering if experience design is in it’s nature limited to crafting futures no more than 3-5 years out (what we generically call Visioning). If you get out much farther than that, your ties to designing for actual human engagement get pretty thin, because there are so many variables that you’re needing to design for multiple possible futures, which is quite taxing.
Now, I don’t know if I believe that experience design is limited in this fashion… Even we are working on a concept video for 2018. But I wanted to get this out there because I think there’s a lot of opportunity to explore the intersection and integration of experience design and futurism, the role that experience design can have in charting paths for organizations. I’d love to hear what you think!
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May 6th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
That’s very interesting. For the most part I feel like designers firmly believe they can influence long-term planning very far into the future — in my person experience I have found that to be very very difficult. Even when you DO have all the data points that support you in framing some different reality.
Your post made me think of Jess McMullin’s Design Maturity Model - though the spectrum of design influence spans from style to framing, framing is fuzzy and there is no sense of longevity there.
His example is a good one in that it makes it very clear that design contributes with principles and guidance for something that is not concrete and actionable (short/mid term) — potentially delineating some boundaries that could shape long-term scenarios, but that’s not capable of delineating these scenarios by itself.
Please explore more, this is interesting. Thanks for making me think…
May 7th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Hey Liv,
Thanks for the reference
Most framing we’re invited to participate in really works on a shorter timeframe, but I think a lot of our skills and mindset apply to the long view, too.
Simona Maschi has done some really smart work in looking at the spectrum of scenario work from user/task scenarios through to future strategic scenarios a la Royal Dutch Shell (and later GBN). Unfortunately, I can’t find her deck via Google anymore
Matthew Milan’s backcasting stuff is also pretty relevant here…since backcasting ties into GBN type scenario planning, but actually points out paths and options.
We have been a bit involved in a 2020 vision project, and I spent time teaching scenario planning at the workshop we just taught in Miami.
Our goal with futures research like that is very often very simple though - we aren’t shaping corporate strategy, we’re just trying to break free of the client’s “official future” so that we’re not locked into the assumptions embedded in the status quo.
Even when we look at longer horizons it’s most often in service of strategy for the offering in that mid-term.
If you’re looking at deep trends (climate change, energy, healthcare + demographics) then designing for all possible futures is impossible. But there’s no rule in scenario planning (or in experience design visioning) that you have to cover all the bases. GBN uses scenarios to provoke strategic conversations - I think experience design tools like tangible futures / prototyping / etc. can serve well to round out those possibilities and make the stories more concrete and relevant to the people using them in the here and now.
Great post Peter
May 21st, 2008 at 12:34 am
[...] ideas. Andrew Blau joined us from Global Business Network to talk about scenario planning (read Peter’s blog post and Roland’s post for details.) One of Andrew’s comments was about creative misreading. [...]
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:25 am
[...] Designing Futures [via Zemanta] [...]
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 am
Peter,
A few months have passed (and the 02018 concept video you mentioned, for “Aurora” I suppose, released in the meantime) but I imagine these issues are no less relevant to your practice.
I’m a futurist who has come to design as a collaborative practice, out of a combination of opportunism and necessity. Futurism (usually just “futures”) has existed for decades and yet hasn’t had a discernible impact on mainstream thinking about the future. Me and some of my colleagues in futures have been resorting to design (and “experience design” is a usefully broad, in the sense of medium-neutral, language for it) as a way to communicate scenarios. Not just with three or five-year time horizons, but decades. For example, in 02006 we put 550 people into four different versions of the year 02050 (link).
How? We do it by assuming lots of things. Assumptions render unforeseeably fuzzy times concrete. But each scenario deliberately, and systematically, adopts different assumptions, so we’re covering a range of important contingencies. Those assumptions don’t appear out of thin air, they’re each based on a different theory of what could happen, going forward. This approach could, and perhaps should, be used as a basis for creating more long-term, robust design concepts.
My current research concerns using experience design to explore futures more effectively: engaging people in feeling, as well as thinking, through their alternatives. The idea is that thereby they may make-sense more deeply and decide more wisely. I think that in turn, futures can help designers (as with Jamais Cascio helping on Aurora). Increase the variety and depth of the scenarios that set your design context, and the flexibility and resilience of the output concepts will improve. These areas of practice need each other.
I’d love to see Adaptive Path take on some longer-term, bigger-picture experience design challenges. Push that red line out beyond the decade: there’s more to explore out there!