Designing for the future

In our day-to-day work, the scope of a project will naturally come with constraints. Time, budgets, and technical dependencies will all play a role in the decisions the designers and other stakeholders make during a project. These limitations are normal and its part of the designers role to work creatively within them. However, sometimes it’s useful to remove these day-to-day limitations and allow for curiosity and creativity.

Practices that remove typical constraints, such as design fiction or speculative design, allow designers to play with ideas. It encourages us to explore general concepts and the impact new technologies will have on the world.

As part of UX design course I participated in, our group was tasked with exploring the impact of autonomous driving on the world. We were asked to speculate what it may mean for transport in the near future by considering the user experience.

This was much looser than typical design briefs, and it allowed for greater curiosity, exploration, and debate around the user experience of this future technology.

The storyboard produced when imagining the commute of the future. The commuter did more with their time when travelling and so had more time for their family, giving them a better quality of life.

It became very apparent that it was less about the self-driving car and more about what would be available to the passenger in the car. It presented lots of possibilities for a story to demonstrate the future user experience. Ideas like different vehicles for different purposes such ‘restaurant cars’, ‘movie cars’, etc. were considered. What autonomous vehicles will mean for people’s time, and their relationships. The end result was a very rough video that we quickly pieced together using video and images, demonstrating the commute of the future. While rough, it got the concept we imagined across.

Imagining what new technologies will mean to your users is fun and may be useful in the future. Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

At Threefold, we occasionally take some time for a Design Jam. Here we take some aspect of design we don’t typically work on, such as watch or voice UI, and we imagine what these new technologies will mean to our clients. We work individually, and talk as we design. Conversation is typically debating what we think of this tech, both good and bad, and what we think it will mean to users. At the end of these short sessions, we pitch our ideas (again, often rough) to the team.

The reality is that these exercises are not about the output, but imagining the possibilities. Apart from being a fun team activity, this gets the team thinking about potential use-cases for tech that’s on the horizon. It’s a chance to use our imaginations and flex some creative muscle.

When a project that we’ve speculated around becomes a reality, we’ll be better prepared. We’ll have ideas and opinions. It’s undoubtedly a rewarding exercise for a design team to do.