Future Thieving #2—Speculative design methods and tools
Combining science fiction world-building techniques with design to discover unseen potential futures. Part 2.
Designing for tomorrow is like having a time machine that takes you to alternate futures. You’ll be tempted to visit the Utopias, but only a devoted Future Thief will visit the Dystopias we need to steal from to prevent dark-trend-infested products enabling the end of the world.
The path of an artifact assassin is not easy, however — you’ll have to disassemble something a fellow designer might create in the near future, or perhaps it will be something created by your older self!
If you dare to tread this perilous yet exciting path, let me introduce you to the mind-bending practice of speculative design — stealing a dystopian artifact from a future that may never exist to prevent it from plaguing the world tomorrow.
There’s a dangerous paradox in there, but let’s keep moving.
This two-part series summaries what speculative design is and how it can be practised. If you missed Future Thieving #1, “Stealing from the future with speculative design”, here it is.
Welcome to the future!
Assuming you now have a good idea of what speculative design is, you’ll want to learn how to steal an artefact from the future. To continue your training as a Future Thief, I’ve gathered here for you complete methods and individual tools from across the web.
Speculative design methods
There are many variations of application to use, depending on the purpose of the project — are you exploring future business opportunities, generating discussion on a particular subject, or designing for fiction or art? The seriousness of the outcome is also important — are you just playing with ideas, or are you planning a company’s next product line?
A stand-alone speculative design method
- Step 1 — Identify ‘signals’ of emerging technologies and trends
As speculative design deals with less expected futures, the process begins with identifying more fringe technologies and culture trends. Look for these ‘weak signals’ in emerging technologies and experimental uses. - Step 2 — Ideate a future product
Drawing on Step 1, use various speculative design tools to ideate your future product (See Speculative design tools below). - Step 4 — Storify the product
Design a diegetic artifact that might solve a problem in your future world. Make sure the artifact’s form and function tell a story about its future world and inspires the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. These personal interpretations infuse the discussion in the next step with energy and personality. - Step 5 — Share to generate discussion
Whoever your audience is — stakeholders, fellow designers, social media followers, or the general public — make it easy for them to offer their interpretation of your product. Be prepared with questions that encourage them to articulate why they do or don’t like your future concept, how it might affect them personally, and what they might prefer.
While speculative design doesn’t usually include follow-on action, I suggest we consider adding a response from the prototype creator as an essential final step. While the discussion step is thought-provoking, it cannot guarantee change or effect on the audience, or action from them. Apathy empowers dominating forces, but speculative design began as a challenge to shift power away from the strong current of mass consumerism sweeping us all blindly along.
A commitment to action from the creators in response to any newly realised perspectives could be as simple as:
- Organising an ideation session with fellow designers
- Asking for feedback from experts—like scientists and engineers—or from potential users of the future product
- Learning how to contribute to an issue identified in the process, like joining a related group or writing to an MP
- Getting creative and using a guerilla future installation method, like creating a promotional website for our future product — just make sure you can track and record feedback and reaction
To inspire this step, read about the beautiful concept of active hope (not an affiliate link), which is about moving from passively wishing for a preferred future to actively manifesting it, with a focus on sustainability.
Including a final step of response, and drawing on the diamond design approach, a simplified speculative design method could look like this:
Speculative design as part of a larger future-proofing project
Speculative design methods and tools can also be used as part of a larger and more serious design project, such as future-proofing a company’s product line. An example of this process might consist of the following steps:
Step 1—Ideate future scenarios
Choose a time frame
If you’re looking to innovate for a business, Frog Design’s headline method suggests casting 5 to 15 years ahead, depending on the industry. For an industry that updates its product line every 3 years, then designing for at least 3 years in the future makes sense, and designing for 9 years would be akin to looking 3 cycles ahead. For industries with slower growth, and companies leading in their industry, looking even further into the future can help with long-term strategy and spotting new threats. But the more distant the future you aim for, the more the landscape blurs, and the casting becomes less viable.
Ask “What if?” to generate future scenarios
Think in terms of potential growth areas, risks, existing related technologies, emerging and proposed new technologies, competitors, user needs, behaviour trends, supply chains and related industries. Research these areas and map out where they might be in your chosen timeframe, and how they might affect each other. Explore best, worse and in-between future scenarios.
Step 2 — Ideate future needs and problems
Ideate user personas inhabiting the futures you devise to identify their needs and explore future business problems to be solved.
Step 3 — Design solutions and storify
Design solutions to these future dilemmas and use story to bring them to life.
Step 4— Identify preferred future and optimise
Identify the preferred future and optimise it.
Step 5 — Back-cast a future strategy
Back-cast a step-by-step strategy based on what changes need to happen to make the preferred future become realised. You can also map paths back from worst-case scenarios to know what to avoid.
Step 6—Optimise and detail actions
Optimise the strategy and detail the next steps. As the strategy is based on an assumed future timeline, review regularly and adapt to stay on track toward the preferred future.
Examples of speculative design methods
Cover story
Cover Story is an imagination game for businesses to brainstorm their ultimate future state by designing a magazine cover announcing their success. Players are asked to disregard existing limitations to envision a “best-case scenario for their company” and ideate the magazine cover in terms of headline, quotes, images, etc. The process can reveal previously unimagined ideas and directions for the company to explore.
Based on The Cover Story Vision® Canvas created by David Sibbet, of the Grove International.
The Thing From The Future
The Thing From The Future is an award-winning ideation card game for individuals or teams that challenges players to articulate objects from alternative futures. The deck consists of 108 cards of four suits — the type of future the thing comes from, its thematic context, its basic form, and the emotion the object generates in someone from the present.
Players take turns placing cards onto the table until they have a card from each suit — this forms the creative prompt players must ideate on. The players then vote on which concept is the best, funniest, most ironic, etc. The winner of each round keeps the cards played, and whoever has the most cards when the game ends is the winner. The many speculative designs produced can be used for further exploration and innovation. Download print version here.
Created by Stuart Candy, a professor in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at The Ontario College of Art and Design University(OCAD U), and Jeff Watson, an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Games at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Frog Design’s ‘headline’ method
Frog Design uses their headline method to help businesses imagine a future 5–15 years ahead and the products and services that might be needed. Their process focuses on creating future news headlines:
- Step 1: Define the timeframe
- Step 2: Research potential future risks to the business
- Step 3: Ideate a future world
- Step 4: Create many hypothetical news headlines for the imagined future
- Step 5: Choose key headlines and workshop how the business might address these issues
Ethnographic Experiential Futures
Created by foresight practitioner and educator Stuart Candy, and design researcher/futurist Kelly Kornet, Ethnographic Experiential Futures combines Ethnographic futures research — a recording and surfacing of existing concepts of the future — with Experiential futures — a future ideation method that uses multimedia, multisensory, and other story-telling techniques — to create new future concepts, with a focus on stimulating the senses. This wonderful approach makes speculative design prototypes more of an experience with more impact and relatability for the discussion phase.
Candy and Kornet suggest the following process:
- Map: Research how people currently imagine the future to reveal what is considered possible, probable, and/or preferred
- Multiply: Ideate alternative scenarios by challenging the restraints applied to the above
- Mediate: Develop these concepts into tangible, interactive experiences
- Mount: Share via exhibition, interactive workshop, ‘guerilla future’ installation, or other means
- Map: Record response and feedback
Candy and Kornet also created a field guide for their Ethnographic Experiential Futures process.
Science fiction prototyping
Futurist Brian David Johnson developed science fiction prototyping in 2010 in response to the business challenge of anticipating market needs for products after they reach the end of their design and production cycle. Its core methodology involves generating a three-act story as a speculative design prototype to innovate within the areas of science, engineering, business and socio-politics.
- Act 1: Ideate a future — choose a technology to explore and ideate a future incarnation and its experience
- Act 2: Scientific inflection point and ramifications — introduce a catastrophe and story its repercussions on the user
- Act 3: Human inflection point — explore and articulate how a user would remedy their situation
The story is then used for reflection discussions and further product innovation.
Future Scouting
This is my own fun and practical step-by-step guidebook and toolkit for designing life-centred, values-driven technology products from the future. I developed this method as I designed the future products and experiences for my science fiction novels, and applying to create my design fictions.
Check out Future Scouting.
Speculative design tools
Designing for future scenarios is a very creative and imaginative process, so designers should feel free to draw on tools and techniques from both design thinking and the creative arts — storyboards, interviews/questionnaires, games, role-play, writing, animation, film, etc.
Here are a few tools developed by others to help you ideate your futures:
The Tarot Cards of Tech
The Tarot Cards of Tech inspires product designers to envision alternate futures of their product or idea. From the unseen and negative to the hoped-for and ideal, the process helps creators slow down and consider more deeply the impact of their product beyond the obvious needs of its users.
Created by Artefact, a U.S. strategy and design firm.
Future scan
Another great tool for inspiring ideation is the beautiful Future Scan map from the Board of Innovation. It offers over 150 potential future scenarios based on next-gen technologies and societal changes. The map can be used either as a simple exercise by choosing a number from the map and brainstorming that scenario, or as one tool in a larger speculative design process.
Trend Cards & Trend Template
Wedesignthinking is a group of design thinkers from the Netherlands who develop visual thinking tools, training and workshops, and they have created over 200 tools which they share for free. One of their tools that lends toward future ideation is their Trend Cards, which are grouped into four themes:
- Innovation
- Economy
- People
- Regulation
Used in a mind mapping session in conjunction with their Trend Template, the cards can help with plotting trends, creating future scenarios, and exploring ways to futureproof a product or strategy.
Created by WeDesignThinking.
Future Timeline
The Future Timeline is a fascinating, resource-packed website collating predictions for the next two centuries and beyond, including data and technology trends, articles on emerging technology, and much more. Created by London-based writer and futurist, William James Fox, and updated regularly since 2008, The Future Timeline began as a small and quirky website showcasing a brief list of future predictions. Insightful and provocative, the idea attracted many fans and contributors over the years, growing into a vast, community-based project of futurology enthusiasts from all over the world.
You can use the Future Timeline as a resource for speculative design projects to generate ideas about the year or technology you are designing for.
Back to reality
If you’re still reading this, you’ve well-earned candidacy to be a Future Thief. So let’s talk about the biggest challenge you’ll face when you return to the present with your big, fancy future ideas — designing with values.
We designers do our best to champion the user and guard against dark patterns, but the consumer-driven machine we design for moves fast and hungry. Its reactionary timeframes miss properly validating customer desirability, and greedy budgets kill the detail.
So if the voice you bring back from Future Thieving gets lost in the roar—like an unheard canary in a coal mine tunnel—it’s okay to recognise battles you can’t immediately win. But the momentum of the machine can’t prevent you from whisking off down a different tunnel, to where other canaries may be cheep-cheeping about more value-aligned design. Who knows, there may be a whole network down here.
This is one of my other tunnels, and here you are. Cheep Cheep.
This is the way
We need to talk about one more thing before a true Future Thief you become — the dangerous paradox of bringing something to the present day to stop it existing tomorrow.
On one of your visits to dystopia, you might be tempted to keep the advanced artifact to yourself and benefit from the promise of its future seductive influences over the masses.
But Future Thieves have a code — we promise to honour the brave designers of the past by sharing all our pilfered bounties, and to encourage alignment of the lifestyles our designs enable with our sincerely defined values.
This is the way.
Happy stealing, Future Thief, and don’t forget to keep the story going when you get back to the present, any way you can.
Our preferred future depends on it.
If you enjoyed this article, check out my guidebook to Future Scouting — a step-by-step speculative design method incorporating life-centred design, product design, and science fiction to get you saving the world and back to the present well before the next pandemic!
More from Damien…
Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:
- Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
- Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design
Explore Damien’s design guides and toolkits:
Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.
