Deep Design: Envisioning the Future with Speculative Design
Speculative Design has immense potential to help shape the future, but how can we get companies focused on it today?
By Declan Kickham, BCG Digital Ventures
Drawing from both critical design and science fiction, Speculative Design employs design methodologies and creativity to bring possible futures to life. Originally popularized at the Royal College of Art by Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, the discipline emerged as a counterargument to the commercialization of design in the ’90s. Rather than focusing on fine details, it gave designers license to explore larger questions about their projects’ context.
Through deep research, trend analysis, and creative exploration, practitioners of Speculative Design enable observers to imagine a probable to possible future and to explore relevant questions about it, such as what the consequences of technology adoption might be or how to deal with an emerging societal trend. The process differs from traditional design in that it uses design outputs (products, film, imagery or screens) as inputs, with the aim of translating uncertain futures into present day choices, as Superflux, the award-winning speculative design studio puts it.
In pop culture, Speculative Design has appeared on TV in the British anthology series “Black Mirror,” yet the practice has numerous non-entertainment applications. It’s been used by design studios to critique social media companies, by companies trying to understand the second and third order impacts of autonomous cars and even by governments trying to plan 30 years out for an aging population. Such scenarios offer valuable insights into people’s reactions to these possible futures. Ideally, they are used to inform design in the present, so we are collectively prepared when that future state is achieved.
Despite its immense potential, Speculative Design has a somewhat tenuous relationship with the business world. Most leaders who have encountered Speculative Design consider it a worthwhile experiment in imaginative thinking that may generate some productive discussions. When all is said and done, however, often the only thing that remains is a workshop poster on a wall. It rarely leads to concrete actions that translate into day-to-day operations or long-term strategy.
The challenges of today’s business and social world require a fresh look at this relationship. Speculative Design offers businesses a strategic tool for spotting potential opportunities and risks, while posing the hard questions and maintaining its responsibility to society. It has the potential to invigorate organizations with creativity and future-looking capabilities, while allowing creative people to look outside the parameters of the screen and onto the bigger problems that we face today.
How can we help larger audiences absorb Speculative Design projects?
Speculative Design can be a one-way trip to a distant future, where designers extrapolate an emerging trend and combine it with a technology that fits into the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle. The resulting future is strange and exciting, often leaving the observer with a nauseating uncertainty about what it means for today’s world.
To understand how we might make a complex future more digestible, we can look to a revolutionary product: the iPhone. On its debut, Steve Jobs described the iPhone as “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and breakthrough internet communications device.” Remarkably, he told the audience, the technology being introduced was not three separate devices, just one. Apple has succeeded in becoming one of the most valuable companies on the planet not by pioneering new technologies, but by taking cutting-edge, shoreline technologies and making them understandable (and desirable) to the masses. Jobs accomplished this by using present day products to describe the future product, providing the audience with points of reference within which to place it. Linking speculative futures to today’s world, by using reference points or focusing on functionality, helps people absorb complexity quickly, allowing them to focus on implications.
How can we help businesses create action plans from our speculative futures?
Experts in the field of Speculative Design have developed many tools to envision the future. These tools are helpful in getting designers to the imagined futures, but don’t do much in terms of helping us generate actions from them today.
Backcasting is a tool developed in the ’80s that can help organizations take action after engaging with the speculative design process. It’s the process of taking a vision of the future and working backwards to get there, targeting key milestones to ensure progress and enable course correction along the way. It works well for straightforward problems but isn’t broad enough to account for the multitude of possibilities in our VUCA world. Combining it with Speculative Design, however, we can create many possible futures, and use backcasting to direct us toward desirable future states.
How can we promote the use of Speculative Design as a tool for making long-term decisions?
Speculative Design was developed to help us consider a broad range of implications. This practice is key to building successful products, services and businesses. The best place to start is by bringing in a diverse group of stakeholders to develop and react to our futures. This allows us to understand what is desirable from multiple viewpoints and to create actions to get to that future state.
Once we have become familiar with the actors involved in a future scenario, we can use backcasting to understand how each milestone along our path back from the future will impact each of them. This not only helps ensure we’re taking into consideration our impact on a wider group of stakeholders, it also gives us a much better chance of reaching the desired future we’re building.
Ultimately, predicting the future is not an accurate science. Design is a messy practice and adding speculation to the mix only adds complexity. If the last few years has taught us anything, it’s that there will be things that get in the way of any desired future — conflicting interests, black swan events and entirely new problems to solve. However, by asking the right questions, engaging the right people and getting to work today, we can help shape our tomorrow.
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