Improving digital experience with Speculative Design
Can we improve digital experiences by combining a user-centred design methodology with Speculative Design?
What is Speculative Design?
As designers, we are obsessed about users and making digital products easy, accessible and delightful to use. By combining a user-centred design process with speculative design, can we speculate about possible futures to inform and improve our designs in the present?
Speculative design is “a tool to create not only things but ideas…[Speculative] design is a means of speculating about how things could be — to imagine possible futures.” (Dunne and Raby, 2014)
In simple terms, speculative design is the use of conventional design methods combined with future thinking to investigate current trends, called signals. These signals can be anything from cultural, technological to legal. Once a signal is identified it can be projected forwards in time to create artefacts that could exist in a future scenario. The act of interrogating possible futures can help to stimulate critical reflection, discussion and understanding of the implications for the present.
Backcasting
Speculating about a future scenario and what would be required to make it exist, is helpful to understand the impact of our actions, trigger debate and the exchange of ideas. By speculating about the future and then backcasting to the present, we can understand the present better and perceive things that are happening now from a different perspective.
Backcasting is a group activity in which participants propose a future scenario and then work backwards to construct a causal chain leading from the future to the present.
In the book “Speculative Everything” by Anthony Dunn and Fiona Raby, a taxonomy of futures is described. Possible, plausible and probable futures. Thinking in this structured way can allow active participation in, and the practice of, speculative design. We can imagine the most probable and plausible future artefact based on signals from today but also imagine an extreme possible future artefact with only our imagination as a constraint.
Speculative design in the real world
Uber, the ride hailing app is a good example of how speculative design could benefit a digital experience team.
Uber is a revolutionary app, profoundly changing the way people travel. Rapid growth has come with big challenges including protests from taxi drivers, legal challenges and cities banning the app. When designers at Uber were in the early stages of development, they would have been able to mitigate some of those risks by incorporating speculative design into their user-centred process. Speculating 5 or 10 years ahead might have helped Uber to understand some of the future implications of the digital experience they were creating and allow them to design out problems at an earlier stage.
A framework to practice Speculative Design?
Speculative design works well as a group activity involving multidisciplinary team members. It can stimulate discussion and create the conditions for participants to contribute their own expert view and see things from a new perspective.
Real value can be gained by challenging assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role digital experiences have in everyday life.
• A group, looking at current trends and signals, can decide what areas to speculate about. These could be cultural, governance, demographic or technological.
• Examples of a signal include “In Sweden, only 40% of transactions were cash in 2018” or “52% of American homes have a voice assistant such as Alexa or Google Assistant.”
• With the signals in mind, key questions can be asked to help the group think about future realities. What is the most desirable outcome? What are the ethical implications? What is the most ridiculous outcome?
• Signals can be combined with ideas from an agile backlog and strategic business goals to create an artefact to represent a future scenario. The artefact can be a storyboard, a mock-up of a website, a sketch, a poster or a short story. E.g. a mock-up of an onboarding page for a new app or digital service launching 10 years from now, detailing the features and benefits of the new technology.
•The multidisciplinary team can then take part in a semi-structured discussion using parallel thinking to practice backcasting. This will help to uncover the actions that would need to happen for the artefact to become a reality and what the implications would be for the design team.
The output from the speculative design session can be recorded and collated into design ideas, facts, intuition, comments, opportunities, problems and judgements. The team can then discuss and prioritise the output.
Limitations of Speculative Design and when to use it
Speculative design is often used by innovation and digital transformation teams with a specific goal to challenge current norms and think about digital experience in new ways. However, it can also be used by wider digital teams to encourage future thinking at an organisational level.
Some limitations of speculative design are:
• It requires stakeholders at all levels and it’s often difficult to get everyone in a room at the same time.
• The output from a speculative design workshop is difficult to track because there is no sprint deliverable that can be measured. This makes it difficult to get buy-in from senior stakeholders.
• It’s not an exercise to define a product roadmap or to predict the future and shouldn’t be used with those outcomes in mind.
Conclusion
The value of Speculative Design not only comes from the output of the session but from the act of thinking about the future itself. A multidisciplinary team that has explored future scenarios and uncovered new perspectives in a structured way will be equipped to imagine innovative digital experiences and feel invested in making them a reality.
If you’re still unsure about how to practice speculative design watch a few episodes of Star Trek, they’ve been doing it since the 1960’s!
