Tomorrow’s Trade Fair
An intensive and interactive program where participants use design fiction and experiential futures to create and evaluate artefacts from near futures.
In today’s rapidly changing world, it’s more important than ever to think critically and creatively about the future. This is where futures-oriented practices like Design Fiction & Experiential Futures comes into the designer’s and researcher’s toolkit as powerful ways to nourish new kinds of meaning and perspective that create new value for people, our planet and organisations.
Recently, Giovanni Caruso, Silvio Cioni and I worked with students from The Master in Interaction Design program at Domus Academy in an intensive 12 hours program, where they explored the value of Design Futures practices as a research tool in design and strategy settings and for the development of new product/service concepts, and they actively participated in a full day hands-on activity to experience the approach.
The goal of the program as part of a Master in Interaction Design is to encourage students to think beyond the limits of current technology and design solutions, and to explore possible future scenarios that could arise from the advancement of technology and the changing social, cultural, and environmental landscape.
By engaging in speculative design and design fiction exercises, students can learn to develop their skills in conceptualizing and prototyping products and experiences that are not constrained by the present time and can become mandates for research solutions and their consequences today and in the future.
How the program worked
Gratefully inspired by Stuart Candy and Filippo Cuttica, Futures Bazaar toolkit, and Near Future laboratory, Work Kit of Design Fiction we designed the program Tomorrow’s Trade Fair, a dynamic and engaging experience that lasts for 1.5 days, consisting of a half-day introductory lecture and a full-day workshop.
At the end of Tomorrow’s Trade Fair, students were given the opportunity to set up a fair and sell the artefacts they had prototyped. This program not only provided an interactive learning experience for the students but also created the space for discussing and debating about the diverse future scenarios students were envisioning.
Half-day lecture
The half-day lecture and warm up exercises aimed at helping participants to familiarise with design futures practices and to stretch their imagination muscles.
Full day workshop
The full-day workshop, aimed at guiding students through a day into the applications of Design Futures practises to envision future worlds and build artefacts from the future.
The day was divided into two parts. The morning was dedicated to envision ideas, and the afternoon to build prototypes of artefacts, their archetypes, and to set up the fair.
Exercise 1 | Futurescape
The aim of the first activity was to collaboratively envision the characteristics of a future world.
Students were provided with a future scenario generator to generate their team scenario prompt (see more information about futurish cards on which the prompt generators were built at this link ) and collaboratively envision the characteristics of your future world, by asking themselves what kind of society, technology, economy and environment they might see in that future.
Exercise 2 | Artefacts from the future
The second exercise aimed at generating ideas and at identifying the artefacts students will prototype as a team and put on sale at the trade fair.
Students were provided with future artefact generator to generate their artefact prompt.
Exercise 3.1 | Prototyping the artefact
After each had identified the idea of their artefact, they chose what and how they wanted to prototype it. They could access to different prototyping materials we provided them to.
Artefacts from the future are representations of how everyday life might be different in the future
Exercise 3.2 | Prototyping the archetypes
Not lastly, students were asked to develop Design Fiction Archetypes. Archetypes are cultural artefacts that can make people forget they are not living in the future yet.
By drawing on familiar archetypes, this technique lets participants explore how emerging social conditions, technologies, interactions, or big-picture changes might play out in our world.
Students had been provided with a list of possible archetypes they had to choose from (e.g. product package, starting guide, promotional video, Printed user reviews, etc..)
Exercise 4 | Set up the fair
Part of the workshop activities was to set up the fair that represented the situation that students designed to create an immersive experience of the future that they envisioned and made it tangible through the generation of different future artefacts.
“What’s next?
The end of a project presents an opportunity for both celebration and learning. We have identified key areas for improvement in the next iteration of Tomorrows’ Trade Fair kit and experience.
- We are not designing the next iPhone.
The goal of Tomorrow’s Trade Fair is to familiarise students with Design Futures through crafting, Design Fiction, and Experiential Futures.
Our ultimate aim is to “design for implications, not appearance”.
We question technology and its effects on culture and society. Therefore, we will integrate a post-fair session to explore cold feedback and how to foster the production of such feedback. - The future looked like mindless magic (sometimes)
Some products were tech stunts that displayed behaviour that is hard to address, even considering the rapid evolution of science and technology. For the next iteration, we will tie product design to thorough implications of the generated scenarios. - Buried alive…consistently
Exploring the interplay between objects and their multiple archetypes confirmed that richness is a crucial factor. This refers to creating an ecosystem of second-order design fiction artefacts (not to be confused with Tony Fry’s take on it). To increase consistency, we will change the way we define scope and time frame to stimulate the construction of a richer story world populated by different but still coherent artefacts. - The suspension of disbelief
Due to time constraints, we had to rush a bit and squeeze in numerous activities, which impacted the final outcome. Thus, it will be crucial to increase the fidelity and credibility of products and artefacts for participants.
