Future Design workshops | Sketching risks, unknowns and dreams
Plan next quarter or prototype next decade.
I am a huge fan of science fiction. Set in foreboding, dark futures, human creativity defies existential threat. Perhaps I love Design because it lets me defy user problems in tiny increments.
Since seeing Sony’s ‘One Day, 2050’, I’ve had a fascination with Future Design. And for the past two years, it’s helped me to work with teams on articulating difficult problems while looking ahead.
Below are some of the workshops I’ve designed or participated in. Enjoy!
Forecasting risks
Sometimes the best way to fix a problem is prevention. This is where risk forecasting comes into play.
Pre-mortem
A post-mortem in reverse, pre-mortems are a great way to collect realistic risks to a project, campaign or even long-term vision. You put yourselves in a future scenario, where the ‘thing’ has already failed. “Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the pre-mortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died” according to the Harvard Business Review.
Like any workshop, these work best with a multi-disciplinary crowd. Mixed skills and experience offer increasingly different perspectives to challenge your senior management’s bias.
You can simply imagine failures and nothing more. Or do further work, such as grouping these failures, ranking them by impact and exploring proposed ways to mitigate them. It’s up to you.
One nice aspect of sessions like this is that they generate new ideas to be further explored in subsequent activities. You may want to explore a single risk in a Seminar Game, which we will cover next.
We recently ran a pre-mortem regarding a large piece of ongoing work and were surprised at the sheer amount of risks we collected.
Means-testing capabilities
There are many ways to means-test a product, service or other capability. They vary dependent on the domain.
Seminar Game
A seminar game usually refers to a scenario-led activity, where participants respond to simulated external circumstances. Governments might use this to pre-plan for a crisis, such as a water shortage or major incident. Militaries run ‘war games’ to practice tactics and trial their capabilities. Businesses can use these to ‘trial run’ a campaign or explore future scenarios and discover opportunities or weaknesses in their offering.
It is like a pre-mortem, but rather than predicting challenges, you are responding to a challenge in real-time. You don’t get to cherry pick imaginary ways to respond to a scenario. You operate within realistic constraints.
The scenarios can be pre-written, but they can also evolve and change. Either due to your team’s choices or due to decisions made by a team of antagonists known as the ‘red team’, responsible for making the game more challenging. Consequences are discussed and analysed afterwards for learnings.
I recently ran a seminar game at Kaluza to explore certain challenges that may be encountered by both ourselves and our clients, as Great Britain transitions to fully renewable electricity.
Writing the scenario was difficult, as they were quite abstract and intangible. But participants agreed they would all like to re-use the format at a team-level.
Pitch-a-thon
This is arguably a kind of seminar game, but worth a separate mention. I put together a novel concept as part of Kaluza’s awesome Firebreak week (protected time to experiment twice a year).
Our Pre-sales team were asking for help from our part of the business, which is responsible for APIs. They wanted to produce more presentation templates and grasp a high level understanding of how things like web-sockets, GraphQL and analytics tables work.
I felt the product managers would have more empathy for Pre-sales if they actually knew how it felt to put together a pitch/presentation themselves, with insufficient time and about a topic they aren’t fully familiar with.
So for the workshop, product managers took over products they don’t usually manage or understand. They were given a theoretical RFI (request for information from a prospect) to respond to, which I co-created with our Pre-sales team.
After a time-boxed catch-up with a domain expert to introduce them to the basics of their new product, participants would fill in a template of slides to showcase that product’s capabilities and offering for the use case.
We uncovered weaknesses in our company documentation, heavily relied on by participants to answer questions about product capabilities. And this helped us grasp the kind of things Pre-sales need to quickly learn about.
We agreed to run this workshop twice a year going forwards.
Designing concepts for the future
Hackathon
A well-known format, the hackathon is exciting and daunting. Teams set out “to collaborate in order to solve a problem or identify new opportunities”. At Kaluza, we ran a two day hackathon with several problem statements to choose from, where we attempted to solve known energy issues using artificial intelligence.
The competitive element pushes the action, but also places additional pressure on teams. To an extent, this can harm the outcome of the workshop. Winners are often teams that communicate well and avoid biting off more than they can chew. Not necessarily winners that have the most transformational idea.
But it is still an excellent opportunity to be hyper-focused on a specific problem and break things while you solve it. Our team won (🥳), I believe because of the following:
- our idea supported short and long term goals
- we divided responsibilities from the start and communicated well
- we kept our idea small enough to finish properly within the time limit
Future prototypes
I ran a series of Hyper Island Mash-ups with various engineering teams throughout 2022/23. The brief? Of course it was AI! You can read what we did here. But effectively, participants combined known products, user needs and AI tools to rapidly experiment with ideas. We did this, not to come up with short term concepts, but to understand what shape our teams might take in the medium-term future.
This combo technique was briefly used later in one of many workshops for our company’s 3 Horizon visiontyping initiative. Something we are still using to envision versions of Kaluza across three horizons; the short term, medium term and long term.
Design Director Evi Malisianou led this future design approach, the concepts of which have been taken to conferences and investment pitches as well as applied to company strategy.
I have contributed user research to various pockets of this visioning activity, but my main involvement was in personifying future users and articulating a story arc that shows challenges and opportunities for us to offer value. I used the PipDeck’s Storyteller Tactics to help me get through this in limited time. Our team then designed low fidelity mock-ups of how future offerings help address the character’s challenges, as part of a presentation.
The great thing about this approach is that the vision can continually evolve. Although, these tend to become more fantastical and less realistic. It takes real discipline to avoid cherry picking your future setting, to fit a concept or vision that people feel a bias towards. So continuous reviews by different colleagues and strong stakeholder engagement is key.
That’s it folks
I feel this is one of the most interesting parts of the job for any designer. Coming up with sci-fi ideas and designing them. With the developments in robotics, AI, quantum computing and XR, Future Design feels more relevant than ever.
