Designing across futures

Sketchin extends its offering to help companies and communities meet the challenges that the future is bringing.

Luca Mascaro
Moving forward
8 min readOct 1, 2020

--

Photo by Photos Hobby

When I founded Sketchin fourteen years ago — yes, I know, its birthday would be October 10, and this announcement only anticipates it by a handful of days — my ambition was to design digital tools that improve people’s experience, then often struggling with complex and frustrating interactions. Things have changed in the meantime, digital products and services have evolved, and so has the ability of design to develop increasingly simple, engaging, immediate solutions, driven by an ever-accelerating technological transformation.

In these 14 years, the role of design has also become more evident: a great interpreter of the technological potential and people behaviour, able to identify the opportunity spaces of the former at the service of the latter. Put even more simply: the task of design, in my opinion, is to understand how to use technology to make people live experiences always above their expectations. Since October 10, 2006, this has been the great intuition that has supported, without faltering, the activities of the firm.

But it would be a bit short-sighted, on our part, to limit our attention to technology, design, products, services, systems, pixels, blueprints, prototypes…in short, to that “technological adventurism” — said with the beautiful words, a bit impertinent, of that genius of Carl Woese — to which our work sometimes seems to be reduced. Our studio is part of a wider world, immersed in the continuous flow of becoming and transformations: environment, society, market, people. The complexity of reality also pushes us to face dilemmas and to question ourselves about the nature of our work and the services we can offer.

The five primary forces of change

This year has been emblematic: the epidemic that still plagues the world has been the paradigm shift in our experiences, comparable — for scope and effects on behaviour — to war, the spread of the Internet, the use of the smartphone. But we know it, no black swan is such, what is failing is our ability to anticipate it, while the signals or elements that contribute to the transformation are already present. They are weak signals, the picture is composed only with a great effort of interpretation and great attention, but it is a possible operation.

In this case, the pandemic had already been talked about for some time, we didn’t know how it would be — and all in all, it went well, do you remember Ebola in Central Africa a couple of years ago? In Switzerland there were a couple of cases… -, climate change and its threats have taken a leading role in the public debate and the world’s scientific, political and economic agenda. The world population continues to age, gentrification is an evident phenomenon both globally and within nations, the world economy has been in a slow recession for a few years, and technology is galloping at exponential speed.

The week signals that shape the current paradigm shift

We perceived how ours was really the society of risk and how its management was pushing us resolutely towards a second modernity, and how change was moving along elliptical, non-linear trajectories. Over the past couple of years, we have begun to reflect on the future, its challenges, and how we, as a firm, should change to remain relevant and keep the value of our work.

Designing through the spectrum of futures

In short, our intuition was this: our role must be to help our customers — mainly companies, but also organizations, public bodies, communities — to explore their future and to design tools and services that enable them sustainable development.

Said more clearly: the focus of the firm has expanded to embrace a stronger perspective towards the future, to accompany firms and organizations in an exploration of their future, anticipating possible challenges and using the tools of design and the opportunities of emerging technology to chart possible and sustainable paths.

Ambitious? A little bit 😏

But let’s try to clarify. Meanwhile, the future, in itself does not exist, is a possibility that may or may not happen. The future is, therefore, a spectrum of eventualities, some practically certain, others probable, others still improbable. What we do, as people and as groups, is to choose — more or less consciously — what we prefer, which most satisfies us based on the information in our possession. As people, we explore our future and give a direction to our actions, tracing our very personal path.

The future is defined progressively and allows those who can interpret information to plan and plan their evolution. In other words, it is possible to deal with the future with a design approach, with all the precautions of the case. The more remote the future is, the more the margin of randomness increases.

We want to do the same with our clients: we would like to help them to look forward to understanding which direction is preferable for them, the one they want to take according to their ambitions, values, opportunities, we would also like to help them to understand what their role will be in the long term, but also to manage the transition from now to then.

Three years ago, we started asking ourselves these questions. Shortly afterwards — but quietly, behind the scenes, to prepare for the industrialization of this new line of services — we began to establish partnerships with some courageous clients. With them, we developed their future services and products through disciplines such as venture design and concept to launch and help them understand their long-term future through transition design activities.

The different kind of futures

Now, near and next.

Our new line of offering, which extends to the traditional one, unfolds over three temporal strands.

Now — from today up to one year

Some futures are almost as sure as the present, whose challenges are well defined and must therefore be addressed. Digital transformation, for example, fits perfectly into this type of horizon. The firm’s traditional offering responds correctly to this type of challenge.

At a time like this, which we have called a hybrid continuity, transforming your products, services and processes to respond to changing people’s behaviours has become an unavoidable necessity.

Near future— from two to four years from the present

The relevance of the future increases when dealing with the dimension of the “near”. In the market and technology, things seem — caution is a must — to have reached a lower level of uncertainty. Progressively emerging technologies will enter a phase of maturity and therefore can be adopted in a specific time, in the same way, the regulatory framework is becoming more precise and begins to rule some grey areas.

This allows companies, for the first time in decades, to define a horizon of transformation by planning the technological leap in the short and medium-term. It will enable us to look to the future with a design and industrialized approach: it is, therefore, possible to design and launch the next business of our customers.

We have created a path of this kind with Flowe, an ELMI (electronic money institution) and a benefit corporation that is part of the Mediolanum Banking Group. We have recently concluded a venture design and concept to launch to define a new user experience through a native app, which in addition to account and payment services could also offer an entire ecosystem focused on improvement, sustainability and wellness.

We have helped Flowe conceive the idea of a different and sustainable way of banking and managing savings.

The new realities, therefore, exploit the enabling power of technology to provide new services and unique experiences compared to traditional ones, starting from the new needs of customers. They do not replace conventional banks but force the financial system to a profound renewal: customer centrality, user experience, organizational evolution.

Driven by these challenges, the bank’s future is to become a lifestyle company, an agent who knows the user and his needs, able to propose and plan future solutions, anticipate obstacles and at the same time allow these needs to be realized through financial transactions. Precisely this type of paradigm shift — from bank to lifestyle companion — illustrates all the power and range of opportunities that can arise if you adopt a point of view geared to maintaining value in the long term.

Next future — in ten years and beyond

In the case of a distant future, the imagination can run free. It is the space of imagination. We can say, without fear of being denied, that in 2375 there will be a Galactic Hegemony. This statement is neither true nor false.

If we interpret correctly the trends already in place, we can make probabilistic statements: in 2030, it is estimated that the world population will be 8.5 million people. This data allows us to make hypotheses in many areas: crop productivity, availability of raw materials, housing, global macroeconomic trends, some assumption on geopolitical assets…., but the margin of uncertainty is still very high. There is all the time in the world for an asteroid to hit us and then goodbye.

It is possible, however, with these assumptions, to develop hypothetical scenarios to promote the transition to a sustainable direction. We did it on the city of Lugano, for example, using the tools of transition design and futurescaping to try to imagine what it would be like to live there in 2040.

We envisioned a new character for mobility in the city of Lugano and the Region nearby, by interpreting the weak signals in society, business and technology and by using design as leverage to exploit opportunities.

Design is fundamental to imagine what the preferred future will be in the next ten years to understand what technologies will mature by then. From here, we can walk in a backwards path to understand what kind of experiences people will live, to identify which will be the technological and operational platforms that will enable them and, finally, to define a roadmap to bridge the gap between that vision and the present.

A new mission for Sketchin

Longo story short, if you have followed me so far. Here is the new Sketchin mission: to help companies explore and face their future by launching new businesses, evolving organizations, evolving the human experience and defining business transformations that create sustainable value over time.

The journey I started with Sketchin and his people has so far been interesting, exciting, full of challenges and a few stumbling blocks along the way, but the future is also a discovery, which is why it’s so thrilling to meet it.

--

--

Luca Mascaro
Moving forward

CEO @sketchin. Passionate of japanese culture in my spare time.