ep. 19: Futures thinking for emerging product design
6 min read
Futures thinking is a mindset and approach to explore, anticipate and plan for potential futures. The episode offers a primer in futures thinking, and highlights why we should practice futures thinking when designing emerging products. This will be the first episode in a three-part series that explores different futures thinking approaches and methodologies.
Futures thinking: a primer
The overarching goal of futures thinking is to help us change how we do things today, to lead to more desirable futures. By generating scenarios or prototypes that depict different future outcomes - both desirable and undesirable, we can work backwards to increase the likelihood of desirable futures in the present.
To further illustrate this, we’ll examine a diagram of potential futures from the book Speculative Everything, which is also an excellent deeper-dive on futures thinking theory and practice.
In this diagram, we see cones fanning out from the present into the future. Each cone represents different likelihood levels of a given future occurring:
Probable futures: This cone in the middle of the diagram represents probable futures, where most design practitioners (not to mention design methods and education) operate, and what is likely to occur unless there is extreme upheaval (e.g., financial crash, eco disaster, war).
Plausible futures: This upwards-tilted cone is focused on the exploration of potential alternative futures (e.g., economic, political). This exploration helps us remain resilient across different futures. Planning and foresight practice lives in the space of plausible futures.
Possible futures: This top cone is focused on more “far-out” - but still scientifically possible - futures, which link between the current world and a future world. A “possibles futures” scenario should provide a believable series of events that lead us from the present to where we are in the scenario. Believability is key, as this helps people relate the scenario to their own world. Speculative culture, such as science fiction, lives in the realm of possible futures.
Preferable futures: The brown cone, intersecting probable and plausible futures, represents desirable futures. Of course, this raises questions about how we define a “preferable future”, and who makes this decision? We can help decide by exploring alternative future scenarios. This can help make the future more malleable, revealing ways we can change the present to increase the likelihood of moving towards more desirable futures, and avoid factors that can lead to undesirable futures.
Futures thinking meets emerging product design
Futures thinking can help us design innovative emerging products more responsibly, strategically, and sustainably. For example, futures thinking approaches can help us anticipate consumer trends and think beyond conventional boundaries (we’ll cover methods for doing this in the next two episodes), resulting in more innovative solutions. By understanding potential futures and how our solution could fit, we can better address potential ethical implications of new technologies before they become entrenched problems. This approach also encourages us to think long-term, designing for sustainability and resilience in the face of potential future challenges and uncertainties.
Today, we’ll outline a futures thinking approach called speculative design, which focuses on designing for how the world could be, asking questions, finding problems, and designing for the future. Speculative design can be contrasted with “traditional” design, which designs for how the world is at present, answering questions, solving problems, and designing for production.
For a concrete example of speculative design, we can look to the Drinkable Book: literal pages of silver nanoparticles that filter sludge from water and kill bacteria. The Drinkable Book addresses the issue of clean water accessibility in developing regions, and while serving as a functioning product, offers a speculative glance into future solutions for water purification. Specifically, it imagines a world where access to clean water is simplified and integrated into everyday objects.
The Drinkable Book provokes thoughts about the global water crisis and the importance of clean drinking water, embedding technology in a common object like a book. It also engages users and the wider public in a dialogue about science, technology, and their potential to creatively address critical societal challenges.
Takeaways
Futures thinking can help us build more innovative, responsible and sustainable emerging products. Speculative design is one futures thinking approach, which focuses on designing for how the world could be, asking questions, finding problems, and designing for the future. Over our next two episodes, we’ll examine other methods and offer how-to guides, to help you build for future markets.
In the meantime, here are three things you can start doing today to shift towards a futures thinking mindset:
Frame your work in future thinking terms. Try using this template: I”m a [fill in the blank] asking questions about the future of [fill in the blank]. For me, this might look like, “I’m a design researcher asking questions about the future of human cognition”. Notice that I didn’t name technologies like “spatial computing” or “AI” - I’m instead focusing people-first, considering topics like what distributing increasingly “thinking” tasks to machines means for people.
Ask “What if?” Start by asking yourself, "What if a new technology disrupts our industry in the next five years? How can we prepare or leverage it?" We’ll build on these prompts in the coming weeks with more structured foresight practices.
Keep reading. For next steps on learning more about futures thinking, check out offerings from the Institute for the Future, Speculative Everything (the book I’ve referenced in this episode), and this case study I published on building augmented reality and 3D tools for anticipated markets.
Human Computer Interaction News
How to get out of ontological debt: Jorge Arango (information architect, author, and educator) discusses the concept of ontological debt, which arises from inconsistent terminology across products within an organization, negatively impacting user experience. Ontological debt is likened to technical debt, where short-term decisions lead to long-term challenges. To address this, organizations need to redesign parts of the system, starting with a conceptual model of the whole system. This approach is different from (and complementary to) design systems that focus on factors like UI elements and aesthetics. Paying down ontological debt requires ongoing leadership support to improve portfolio-wide consistency and user experiences.
The State of UX in 2024: The UX Collective considers us to be in “late-stage UX”, with defining characteristics of automation, saturation, commoditization, financialization, and disintegration. Each characteristic is accompanied by a key insight (e.g., the insight for disintegration is, “user trust is a finite resource”), a breakdown of how these apply to designers and practical tips to prepare for the future.
Spotting visual signs of gentrification at scale: Stanford researchers developed an AI model to detect visual signs of gentrification (typically new constructions or renovations) in cities using Google Street View images. The model accurately predicted gentrification 74% of the time, in the same places where gentrification had been previously found in studies of census and American Community Survey demographic data. Upcoming research seeks to study how changes to the built environment impact individuals’ health and community well-being.
Building a product for anticipated audiences? Sendfull can help. Reach out at hello@sendfull.com
That’s a wrap 🌯 . More human-computer interaction news from Sendfull next week.