Futures Wisdom
Engaging Ambiguity Through Speculative Design
By Maggie Greyson, Nate Gerber, Howard Tam, David Buwalda
“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” — Albert Einstein
As peer consulting firms, ThinkFresh Group and Futures Present are exploring new methods and approaches for developing insight in community engagement. Thinkfresh Group is a boutique consultancy specializing in human experience design, strategy for city building and venture development. Futures Present combines strategic foresight, design thinking, and group facilitation to help clients think long-term when implementing innovative projects, organizational change, and strategic planning.
A key aspect of our work involves supporting communities in future building — helping people become aware of their ability to effect change. Both firms help individuals question assumptions and expand perspectives beyond the constraints of current situations. This work has consistently challenged us to answer the question:
How might we help people work with ambiguity effectively to unlock wisdom?
Part 1: Transcending Limits
Design For New Ways Of Thinking
Future building is an enterprise fraught with uncertainty. We are trapped in the present, beyond that, there is nothing “true” which can be said. The future is not predetermined and cannot be predicted, forecasted or guaranteed. Change itself is the only constant. This is the reality of our agency: we are free to dream, but limited to act. We must begin by accepting this.
In the abstract, future building is a practice of designing contexts and conditions for experience, interaction and change. These enact vision through the pursuit of prospective outcomes. Realities we architect often begin as exercises in information gathering and sense-making. Through interpretation, evaluation and decision, future building finds tangible form in the deployment of governance, policy, strategy, management and action. Ephemeral ideas become substantive realities which mediate relationship and narrative.
As a projection of agency, formalization becomes a framework for enacting reality; a language of confidence rooted in structure and often in control. In such a space, assumptions are perpetuated and the process of engaging ambiguity for deeper understanding is contained. We think and we live from within a fixed and time-limited world.
As human centred designers who seek to practice empathy in our work, we see that the uncertainty of ambiguity is caused not only by the interface between experienced present and unknown future — but also within the present itself, at the intersection of our narratives and our tangible embodied experience.
Speculative design invites participants to build perspectives beyond the constraints of their current story or world. These limitations are built in the projections of our mind. Speculative design challenges these projections. By providing the necessary tools and language to relate across the time constraints of our current experience, speculative design enacts futures thinking, causing us to explore ambiguity — the space of understanding between black and white, what we might call the ‘grey space’. By designing across time perspectives, awareness expands into embodiment — transforming how we think to unlock creative agency. The felt reality of our world, emotionally lived, connects us to the expanse of our heart and its intent — the limitless potential of the present.
Part 2: Challenging Convention
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” — IDEO, a global design and innovation company
A Missed Opportunity For Speculative Design
The Osborne Reef was created off the coast of Florida, USA in the 1970’s. The producers dumped over two million discarded tires into the ocean assuming their actions would create additional habitats for fish. The impact of this decision made without proper stakeholder input had unforeseen consequences. At the time, it would have been impossible to imagine all outcomes of a project of this scale. These tire “reefs” are now considered an environmental disaster with tires being swept up by hurricanes, destroying natural reefs and littering shorelines. It is projected to take three to five years to dismantle enough of this failed project to reduce the damage to the environment and the retrieval costs are in the hundreds of millions. It is often said that hindsight is 20/20. What if foresight were the same?
In planning a project such as this, speculative design can help stakeholders engage with uncertainty by questioning their assumptions at the outset. They could have generated a broader range of potential implications with strategic questions such as:
- What might happen if we valued doubt about the reef’s success?
- How might the tire reef designers create potential mechanisms for tire retrieval if assumptions in the early stages are incorrect?
- How might we give our future organizational selves a graceful way to backtrack without the cost and embarrassment of the potential damage we are currently causing?
Conventional Strategic Planning
Traditional mental models of future reward a fixed frame mindset; the classic five year plan à la Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1932. Prescribing a mid-to-long range future in order to achieve industrial/economic goals was framed as a great success. Stalin’s second and third 5-year plans continued along these lines in a measurable and demonstrable manner. His approach was designed to mask ambiguity. Only the goals — collectivized agriculture or industrial capacity — were considered, not their effects or their failures. The 5-year plans dissuaded critique or considerations of alternatives; it was an all-in approach.
For better or for worse, sticking to the plan is often the plan in itself. This culture has become the mainstay of most organizations. It’s even become a model for career and life planning. As in Stalin’s Soviet Union, it is oriented for progress; mistakes and all. Massive problems erupt AND huge goals are achieved. It is hard to quit. Leaving the story of the plan exposes the ambiguities and risks of reality — and it can feel irresponsible to let go.
Planning With Strategic Foresight
However, this approach is no longer enough in today’s world, an era that is characterized by high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. On its own, traditional 5-year planning can’t keep up with the modern pace of new technology or cultural shifts. It doesn’t consistently value failed attempts as interesting data for new ideas. In an effort to control outcomes, it externalizes responsibilities, inadvertently creating kurtosis risks (more on kurtosis risk).
Employers need to draw on the collective wisdom of their employees, stakeholders, and those who are impacted by the unintended consequences of their decisions. This is an important matter for leadership and culture. Wisdom that can be gleaned from unexpected outcomes — including failure — lives here and now, not only in the black and white analysis of flawed assumptions. Wisdom can be found in designing for the ambiguity of the grey space.
Speculative design can help people participate in democratic processes and innovations by supporting this dialogue. It is much easier to express understandings and integrate critiques in the context of design fiction than in the politics of a fixed plan. It is much easier to agree that a speculative artifact or experience raises multiple interpretations than to envision the long-range impacts of systems change.
A collective acknowledgement that there are multiple perspectives in the grey space:
- decreases anxiety because it helps identify assumptions
- adds more insight into a blurry future narrative by challenging reality
- course corrects perceptions that the futures are only menacing because the artiefact of experience becomes an opportunity for critical thinking about use cases
Part 3: Expanding Perspectives
“Are we ready to take on the God-like ability to manipulate the plasmas of life?” — Agi Haines
Enhancing Value by Engaging With Ambiguity
Within speculative design and future building, strategic foresight is a planning methodology that employs the concept of futures (plural, lowercase), for short, medium or long term horizons. To imagine a variety of potential futures is an inquiry into the nature of possibility within the field of view. We work implicitly with a notion one can call Future (singular, title case). Different from futures or even “The Future”, Future can be described as the constant progression of possibility towards unknown experiential states. It is the explicit orientation of time towards the unknown.
Following this logic, designers work in “Present” — a liminal interface of interaction with what is. The experience of Present is defined by embodiment, imagination and speculation — the actions of knowing, unknowing, defining polarities such as black or white, and the ambiguous, grey spaces in between. Present is beyond our stories, beyond our fixed frame narratives, even beyond the individual self. The more we work productively with this ambiguous space, the greater scope of future uncertainty we engage with.
But working with ambiguity can be challenging, not only because of the uncertainty involved but because we often lack tangible description for the liminal grey spaces where it exists. And this is where the tangibility of speculative design practices such as strategic foresight become quite useful. Held by the interface of Present and Future, we are invited beyond our harbours. As designers navigating the seas of potential and possibility, we abandon illusory anchors to the past and embrace a deeper understanding of what can and ought to be. Engaging creatively and critically with ambiguity allows us to challenge predictive assumptions and engage Present in meaningful conversation.
Speculative Design Makes the Ephemeral Tangible
Through speculative design we believe it is possible to see and interact with potential and possibility throughout the innovation process — starting with the relational interfaces between people, narratives, and organizational environments.
Using artifacts and experiences is one way to make imagined outcomes tangible. We can call these experiential futures, design fiction, or fake services. Whatever we call it, this entails visual reminders of the potential impacts of certain choices. Surfacing intersectionality and interdependency, this process creates a diversity of futures imagination within communities, provoking intervention. An interactive object can be profoundly effective at opening up our imaginations because we can interact with the details we see, hear, taste, smell or touch. We can notice our feelings, apply logic to our experiences, and test assumptions to unlock wisdom through critical analysis. The experiential reality of design fiction can shock critical evaluation processes into being, long before dollars are spent or consequences felt.
In this way, designers can help stakeholders in the early phases of a program increase positive outcomes and identify ramifications, a step that is often missed. For example, Near Future Laboratory designed a quick-start guide for a self-driving car. “By all accounts, the self-driving vehicle, unlike the personal jetpack, will come to a salesroom near you sometime in the near future. When an idea moves from speculation to designed product the work necessary to bring it into the world means that it is necessary to consider the many, many facets of its existence — the who, what, how, when, whys of the self-driving car.”
Speculative Design Shapes Ambiguity
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, two of the most influential speculative designers, say that speculative design helps people from different vantage points work together on the same problem. They suggest that speculative design is an effective tool “to create not only things but ideas…” It is a “means of speculating about how things could be — to imagine possible futures.”
For example, Architect Peter Barber is attempting to design a city every day for a year in his project One Year 365 cities. His Instagram account shows his 10-minute sketches that are meant to question the form of cities, including a town in a ravine or disused quarry, a thatched megastructure, and a tiny village with clay buildings. He says “We need to think deeply about our priorities and how those might be reflected in the production and arrangement of space and how we want our cities, towns, villages to be designed.”
No 87….Thatched megastructure village in farmland with arcaded workspaces factories and farm stuff on the lower floors and fun stuff in the gardens in the middle and on the roof
As speculative designs, these city master plan sketches provide an efficient platform for stakeholders to discuss their interpretations. A group of people critiquing what they see provides for a collision of new ideas. When a group notices that there is a diversity of ideas, the activity of the discussion itself becomes meaningful. In the grey spaces between each perspective is an opportunity for wisdom to emerge to make strategic decisions for the future. If these sketches had been rendered as 3D models, what opportunities for learning could emerge?
Putting Speculative Design Into Practice
In our current initiatives, ThinkFresh and Futures Present are working to transform power by making speculative design approaches more accessible to broader audiences.
In a recent engagement exploring strategic design for transit planning, ThinkFresh led a speculative design workshop for planners from agencies across Canada. We created a grey space between how the participants see themselves as individuals and how they see themselves in their respective professional roles. We designed participation supports to draw wisdom from real-world impacts of transit in each individual’s personal experiences. Through appreciative inquiry (a capability-oriented method for exploring a situational context) and visual sketching, participants described and performed elements of their transit experiences with each other. We captured these experiences in storyboards and journey maps — useful visual aids for describing the human dynamics of an experience. Working across narratives, we identified patterns and themes that could shape a collective reimagining of transit services. These themes were finally explored through a series of solution ideas developed to highlight transit design as a response to citizen needs.
Futures Present designed a technique called Making Futures Present to help individuals design a speculative day-in-the-life 20 years into the future. This technique reduces anxiety where they assume there is a singular predetermined future, to visualizing several futures in which they have agency. Participants are invited to co-create multiple futures using their imagination, intuition and real-life examples. During the session, they rapidly prototype a day in their preferred future and artifacts of a specific event of the day. The activities of drawing, writing postcards to themselves, and building prototypes are meant to be a fun way to explore the unknown. Meanwhile, they are using latent and tacit knowledge about the present and the past helps to give them a sense of context and in a future, that seems either one-dimensional or too wide open. The technique is designed to create a grey space in which to explore assumptions. People tend to think of the future in the evolution of overwhelming trends, but not in a series of milestones or turn of events. Evidence of names, artifacts and events anchor us in “reality” but they do not exist in the Future. By creating a speculative design, participants learn to effectively feel the future, and not fear it. That changes how they make decisions while developing a ‘futures mindset’. We are currently working with youth and post-secondary institutions to design a workshop.
Through the Smart City Playgrounds initiative, both ThinkFresh and Futures Present, along with a growing community of urban planning professionals are developing open-source engagement tools for city-building. These resources enable local organizations to mount interactive foresight experiences within their communities. By supporting citizens in these engagements, we can cultivate a more diverse imagination for city life.
Try This at Home
To apply this in your own context, it may be helpful to try on a small futures exercise. Let’s take the theme of “technological determinism” as an example. Often in contemporary culture we find a common futures narrative articulated in the idea that technology ‘marches on’ in the direction of inevitable progress. While there is much evidence to support this pattern, the specific visions of future technologies in our current field of view may look nothing like what we ultimately will create, or what we may need. To expand our perspective, let’s pull out a notebook and ask a few exploratory questions. It can helpful to timeblock yourself to a few minutes (no more than 10) for each question as you walk through this exercise.
- When you imagine 20+ years into the future — what possible scenarios around technology come to mind?
- What stories about the 20+ year future have you noticed being imagined in the media or in conversations with others?
- Scanning across these imagined futures, what common themes come out? What do these themes imply about how you currently see yourself today and what mainstream narratives are assuming about that?
- Putting on a critical hat — let’s challenge these ideas. What if the future looked radically different to the futures you’ve articulated so far? What possibilities could this open up?
- What implications might considering these alternative futures have on your perspective today?
A simple thing to do once you’ve explored these questions is to take one of the future possibilities that you imagined and make a storyboard with simple sketches. Imagine yourself walking through this future experience. What does the world look like? How does it smell? What environments, objects and interactions are part of your experience?
Taking a step back, how did this exercise make you feel? What uncertainties did you encounter as you developed scenarios? What insights can you bring from this perspective into how you think about technology today, and the actions you might take going forward?
If you did this exercise, or have been working with speculative design in some other way, please consider reaching out and sharing your experience with us. We would love to hear your thoughts and comments!
Through simple exercises such as this, anyone can introduce speculative design and strategic foresight into their context, and expand their perspective as a result. Ambiguity may well arise, leading us into the liminal grey spaces of our understanding. The natural tendency may be to suppress our uncertainty. However, if we choose courage, we can engage effectively with ambiguity. By unleashing our ability to imagine, we find wisdom for building the future.
