speculative design

Intelligences

The Future of Hygiene: Constructive Expansive Futures

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SIDDHARTH KANORIA Quantum Consumer Solutions DIMITRI BERTI Quantum Consumer Solutions CHRISTI KOBIERECKA Unilever There has been significant interest in Futuring as a discipline after COVID-19, as multiple industries are beginning to interrogate their post-Covid future. Quantum Consumer Solutions and Unilever came together to interrogate the post-COVID future of hygiene in Europe, to inform brand and product strategy for Unilever. This project took a culture-first approach to futures, with a diverse and inter-disciplinary team working together using an Agile approach. Using a mixed-methods approach, the team used a combination of digital ethnography, speculative design and an Opportunity Spaces framework to distill the future of hygiene into ten Opportunity Spaces for Unilever. Readers can expect to learn more about why a culture-first approach to futures is recommended, how speculative design could represent an ‘ethnography of the future’ and how a simultaneously analytical and creative approach to futuring could be...

Intelligences

Leveraging Speculative Design to Re-Imagine Product Roadmaps

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SANYA ATTARI Facebook Inc. CHARLEY SCULL Facebook Inc. MAHBOOBEH HARANDI Facebook Inc. Businesses often have strategic visions for the future of a product space; however, identifying and building toward preferable futures is a daunting task, especially when designing for complex systems, e.g., Digital advertising platforms that include multiple complex interfaces and internal organizational structures. Moreover, because businesses need to iterate on products quickly, often in a reactive manner, many businesses, and consequently researchers, struggle to go beyond short-term needs to tackle long-term solutions; that is, they mostly react to immediate needs and changes rather than taking a proactive strategic approach towards building a favorable future. Speculative design as a methodology to support proactive strategic thinking helps set a pathway to explore a variety of future states with participants, in our case business owners. It does so by designing immersive and impactful experiments for participants that draws insight...

Perspectives

Facing the Future in Product Development: Prediction and Uncertainty in Decision Making

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Prediction can create a false sense of certainty – at great cost. Can uncertainty establish a more effective foundation for product development? by HELI RANTAVUO, Spotify Foresight. Tends. Megatrends. Forecasting. Speculative design. Predictive modelling. Impact estimating. These are some of the established methods that researchers and analysts use in trying to understand what the future might look like, and how the organisations we work for and with approach the future. A variety of research and design techniques are available for us to make sense of the future in a structured way. Ethnographers and anthropologists know how to study the present in order to speculate on the future; design teams employ futurecasts and speculative design; futures research employs a wide range of methods that cut across disciplines. With the availability of big data, forecasting and predictive modelling is growing more and more sophisticated. Sometimes I wonder, does the maturity of our methods and frameworks make us feel too confident about...

Intelligences

The City as Organization: Ethnography for Alternative Futures

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JORDAN SHADE International Business Machines Corporation, A Functional Democracy HAL WUERTZ International Business Machines Corporation, A Functional Democracy In this case study we use ethnographic outcomes from the study of the employee population of IBM, to inform new experiences for improving civic engagement in the resident population of Austin, Texas. In doing so, we experiment with a technique in speculative ethnography that uses research insights from a variant population with a variant challenge for in-depth explorations of a possible future. We demonstrate, first, that while in speculative thinking big ideas can be imagined, transposing ethnography enables a richer exploration of possible futures, and thus, further depth in ideas. And second, that by combining speculative thinking with existing ethnography, researchers and design teams can unearth bold experiments and jump start a design process that drives quicker learnings and impact in new contexts. Keywords: Culture Change, Speculative Design, Civic Engagement,...

Intelligences

Speculative Futures inside Corporate Realities

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BEN KUESTER Allstate MEGAN PRESCOTT Allstate The auto insurance industry is being disrupted by insurtechs that are leveraging data and technology to solve pain points in parts of the customer journey, while emerging technology in adjacent industries threatens insurance as it currently exists. As a result, insurance companies are imagining futures beyond traditional insurance and new ways that they might meet the needs of future customers. In order to explore what a reframing of insurance as “protection” could mean to customers, we utilized ethnographic methods and speculative design practices to reimagine how the transition from non-driver to young driver and from dependent child to independent adult could be more fully supported by an insurance company. In this case study, we review both the methodological processes and summarize learnings and opportunities critical to applying ethnofutures and speculative design practices within a large corporate setting, including: proposing a new approach to a diverse group of stakeholders;...

Intelligences

Situated: Reconsidering Context in the Creation and Interpretation of Design Fictions

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MARTA CUCIUREAN-ZAPAN IDEO Design fiction and ethnographic methods strengthen each other by creating a creative but rigorous scaffolding for interrogating expectations and reactions to the future. Design fiction can influence the activities, people, and places in which ethnography is done, and ethnography can create design fictions. Viewers and creators populate design fictions with their own past, present, and hoped for future. The intersection of these methods push ethnography beyond the edges of its thoughtful consideration of the present moment, in order to begin investigating the future....

Intelligences

Tutorial: Speculative Design – Futures Prototyping for Research and Strategy

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Tutorial Instructors: J. PAUL NEELEY Neeley Worldwide & Royal College of Art ELLIOT MONTGOMERY Extrapolation Factory & Parsons School of Design Download PDF SUMMARY In our world where emerging technologies are increasingly a source of significant disruption in people’s lives, methods from Speculative & Critical Design (SCD) practice are finding their way into the designer’s and researcher’s toolkit as powerful ways to create new kinds of meaning and perspective that create new organizational value. These practices design future products and services not in a predictive way, but as a way to prototype and understand the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies. These practices generally decouple design from short-term company product and market needs and visions, and engage in new conversations about alternative futures as a way to better understand and navigate future complexity. SCD often works to design for the messy and complex people that we are rather than the perfect consumers...

Intelligences

Operationalizing Design Fiction with Anticipatory Ethnography

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JOSEPH LINDLEY HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training, Lancaster University DHRUV SHARMA HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training, Lancaster University ROBERT POTTS HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training, Lancaster University Transmuting the entanglement of situations, contexts, artifacts and people, designers mediate the relationship between ‘what could be’ and ‘what is’. All design, then, has an implicit relationship with the future. Latency will always exist as part of this relationship, between the inception of a design concept, development and delivery of that concept, and the manifestation of that concept's potential impact on the world. As we move further into the heart of the Digital Revolution these periods of latency decrease, whilst the breadth and depth of potential impacts increase. Always an arm's length away, but with a velocity and mass greater than at any point in history, the momentum of the future today is greater than ever before. This paper describes the practicalities of operationalizing design fiction, using...