04/13 Experience Scenario — Framing the Future
🔷 Overview — What is Framing the Future?
Our learning experience targets students between the ages of 17 and 23. We imagine our experience to be introduced in class: either to seniors in high school or first and second-year college students. Many of them dream of having an impact on the world but are unsure of where to start. Framing the Future would provide them with a starting point.
Framing the Future is a guided world-building experience that allows students to learn about systems thinking: what factors influence the current state and how you might be able to start shifting that system. Additionally, we imagine that this experience will be tied to a larger platform where organizations can submit different future prompts. By going through the experience, students will generate ideas and answers to those prompts, which they can submit as part of a global competition. Making the experience not only fun but real as well!
🔷 Framework — What are the learner's takeaways?
For our framework, we combined the CCAF & Structured Flow of Goals Model for the steps of our game.
From this:
To This:
🔸 The main takeaways for our Learners are:
- Collaboratively prototype and iterate
- Empathize with different perspectives
- Hypothesizing realistic scenarios for the future
- Researching current world barriers
- Reflect on/respond to feedback
We want learners to take into account different cultures and values as well as worldviews of the present so that they can take action and build towards ideal futures through designing effective interventions. We have our learners brainstorm and iterate on ideas in our experience and utilize “reflection points” to help improve their ideas through group feedback. They will gain unique perspectives from the other stakeholders/learners involved which will help them as a team reach their desired future. They will learn how to collaborate and communicate, respond to feedback, empathize with stakeholders, and think critically about the present and future.
For our reflection points, we incorporate group discussions, voting, and critiques. We include things as wearing the 6 thinking hats which allows learners to take on different ways of thinking about the product (optimistically, cautiously, objectively, etc.) There is also the Harris Profile used at the very end of the experience to check if the criteria of stakeholders were met in the final product’s design.
🔷 Experience Scenario:
Our scenario walks through the first two sub-phases: understanding the future and understanding the present.
🔸 Experience Components:
For the experience we are thinking of using a combination of physical and digital artifacts — the physical board lends itself well to collaboration and teamwork as well as provides a tangible output. While the digital allows for a more dynamic game — providing users with the ability to change future scenarios and submit their ideas to the global competition.
Physical Board:
Stakeholder cards
Worldbuilding cards
Disruption cards
Online Experience Guide:
Chatbot
Visual tracker of game progress
🔸 Play Experience:
1 Intro: Players begin by choosing a Preferred or Un-preferred future. The goal of the game is to design a realistic future artifact for this preferred future.
2 Stakeholders: Then each person takes a stakeholder card. Their first challenge is to write down what they believe their stakeholder's requirements for success are. When everybody has done that, as a reflection, they compare which stakeholder requirements align and which don’t. The final results are recorded using the interface and saved for later use.
3 CLA: The guided interface then presents the players with the CLA of the future world. Their goal is to create a CLA for the current world. The players are provided with current world newspaper articles that they can explore as well as a stack of world-building cards for each level of the CLA: Litany, Causes, Worldviews & Metaphors. They are supposed to sift through the world-building cards and chose the ones they feel best represents their current world. They show their selection by placing 4 cards for the first layer: Litany, into the gameboard iceberg. After finalizing cards for 1 layer, the online interface guides a group reflection/discussion and records a unified answer on the interface for record-keeping.
~NEXT STEPS~
The next steps of the game would be to come up with possible interventions to overcome the barriers of the current world and move into the preferred world. This is still a work in progress.
