Calibrating the Future: Designing Purpose Into Provocations
Creating written or fabricated artefacts to communicate and engage audiences with possible futures is probably the most fun part of working in the futures field. As a final step in a much longer process, artefacts often offer the widest latitude to create and land experience with the intended audience. Yet, as much as it would seem like the perfect moment to go full sci-fi and amp up the weird to eleven, this is actually the time to carefully calibrate the content, form, and delivery of whatever you choose to create to best convey the future you are aiming for, and why it’s interesting or important.
Just as no two futures are the same, the moments, contexts, and windows of receptivity to the communicated form of a future can also differ widely. A wrenching jolt to another reality, a shock to a reader’s system, or conspicuous culture jamming can be disorienting for audiences and will make it harder for them to feel immersed in a possible future. Likewise, landing too lightly, too politely, or too ambiguously risks wasting a vital opportunity to change perspectives. Calibrating where to land in the space between now and this future that you want to transport your audience to takes careful consideration.
Sprinting toward estrangement
Recently, I jumped into what you might call a design sprint with a frequent collaborator, John Willshire of Smithery, in response to a request from a government body, to explore and design different forms of futures provocations. The topic was broad: post-COVID economies. The time horizon to look at was roughly 24 months out — a shallow future in terms of time. The type of output was wide-open. As a demonstration of some of our work, we had our pick of both form and content.
With roughly 72 hours to pull something together — from ideation to production and handover — and little else to define the request, we set about scoping the problem for ourselves. Typically, we would have more access to query the client or user on key issues, and time to dig more deeply into the need. As we address in our upcoming book “How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange,” thorough scoping is an important element of good engagement.
In this case, as a demonstration, we had to answer our own questions and make some assumptions that would not only help us narrow down “post-COVID economies” from a vast topic with fuzzy, volatile boundaries, but also help us design for desirable output in both content and format. We set about making sufficient judgments about these questions so we could cut the challenge down to size, filling in gaps as best we could.
In the book, there’s a lot of ink on the topic of scoping, in large part because it’s not an issue that’s often addressed from a practical, procedural perspective. Beyond the basics of Where?, When?, and What?, a number of soft but determinative issues need higher definition if an exploration is to be valuable or successful for the commissioner or sponsor, as well as users and other stakeholders.
Start as you mean to go on
The first step is defining what constitutes success in this particular situation. What’s the main directive, and what constitutes value for the group or person requesting? For this project, the demonstration of the diversity of forms for futures output was the main criteria, not necessarily provocation or surprise straight out of the gate. These were to be educational pieces created to show possibility and demonstrate range, while not burying relevance. After all, most of the audience for this work — senior policymakers — aren’t aware these future artefact forms even exist as a thing. In this case, we needed to leave a clear trail back to the question or concept for the audience to follow.
Setting the dials properly
All of this meant making some decisions about a correct calibration for this particular audience. Here, calibration means selecting a number of characteristics, or making choices in form and content that suit the situation and the audience — not necessarily the creators. Yes, we wanted to show off some creative skills, as well as mode and style of thinking, but we didn’t need to grandstand. There are plenty of topics, projects, or sponsors who call for serious provocation — shocking, arresting, or unsettling — but this situation called for something akin to estrangement through familiarity.
In this case, a slight reframing of Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle — Most Advanced Yet Acceptable — sprang to mind. Given the parameters of the situation, what might be the most advanced content, in terms of change, but in currently recognizable form? As a starting point, we chose formats that would seem friendly enough to pick up, and likely to inhabit the place in the near future we were exploring. We settled on a bundle of direct mail pieces that might be found in the average doordrop, only in 2023.
Direct mail is a peri-political type of object. Everything from flyers about community issues to pizza delivery coupons to direct campaign mailings finds their way into the mail that slips through the mailslot onto your doormat. Most direct mail speaks to general audiences, so it isn’t that likely to contain information about radical innovations or fringe political groups, but it does represent a kind of boundary between disruptive issues and core political constituencies. Things that hit the direct mail threshold are potential, plausible issues that can shape policy.
Plausibility = enough impact
This left us to work out the payload these mailers would carry, a process that involved rapidly mapping out possible trends in our target country’s national politics, society, economy and so on that might shape issues on the doorstep circa 2023, particularly in electorally important constituencies. After several rounds of brainstorming, we brought clusters of issues and trends together to form situations that might provide the kernel for friction, or a driver for some kind of policy intervention. In the end, we settled on a commercial development project which created a rift in the community, a reminder to follow rules in post-code COVID-21 vaccine testing, a pre-loaded fare card for a new pan-regional transport system, flyers for dance nights at sanctioned beachfront quarantine raves, and a few other items.
Again, none of these pieces were intended to be shocking. They might even be missable if you weren’t looking closely, and yet, they might startle the reader on closer inspection. This is something we learned about a few years back with a mass-market sports tabloid from the future. These artefacts’ plausibility, coupled with familiarity, helped lower the guard of the intended audience, so that the details of the content itself, and the juxtaposition of familiar and new become sufficient provocation to explore more deeply.
The post-assessment: something for everyone
Of course, the decisions you make carefully aren’t worth much if you don’t follow up to find out if they made an impact. In the case above, we received limited — but generally positive — feedback. We appeared to succeed in showing the range of possible formats that futures explorations can take, especially when delivered alongside contrasting forms across a spectrum. In this case, the client received a selection of more familiar analysis documents in different formats, some scenarios, a set of fictional news articles covering similar issues, and our fictional future doordrop bundle. In essence, they got the best of both worlds: a range of outputs that could appeal to individual needs regarding form and content, but which together made a complementary set.
The next situation we design communication artefacts for will probably vary greatly from this illustration. Different issues, timelines, audiences, and many other variables might lead us to opt for hard-hitting emotional impact or to stimulate public debate or create a puzzle to unpick around a particular future. Everything we’ve learned in the range of situations we’ve experienced so far will go into calibrating the next approach. Rest assured we won’t end up with exactly the same response. That’s the fun of it.
You can pre-order How to Future: Leading and Sensemaking in an Age of Hyperchange and find more resources at howtofuture.com/buy.
