Presenting: A menu for Futures Prototyping

Mar 22

The majority of our work at Falay Transition Design deals with the ambiguity of the future. But working with the future inevitably comes with some level of uncertainty and abstractness. After all, how can we understand and experience something which doesn’t exist yet?

From collective imagination workshops to strategic transition design sprints, many of our projects grapple with this question of how to make the future more visible and tangible, and therefore “real”. We’re also constantly inspired by other creative minds working in this space, such as Phoebe Tickell and her imagination activist work, Rob Hopkins and his endlessly motivating conversations about the future, Monika Bielskyte and their framework of Protopian Futures, and the works of creative agencies like Superflux, Climavore, Extrapolation Factory and Space10 whose projects explore the future in such engaging ways. And of course, if you haven’t already, then we highly recommend having a read of our blog with Susa Eräranta from the City of Helsinki’s Climate Unit about the approaches they’re utilising to help citizens imagine the future.

Building on these practices and our additional backgrounds in service design and systems thinking, we have been developing a framework of approaches for Futures Prototyping, which explores different routes to making abstract visions of the future tangible and experiential:

What is Futures Prototyping?

In traditional design contexts, prototypes are early samples, models or releases of a product, which are a key part of product development. It helps us to engage with the idea of a product before it is fully realised or put into production. In service design, this concept is expanded to test and build a service experience collaboratively.

So what does it mean in the futures context? Futures Prototyping combines futures-oriented creative approaches to imagine, experience, iteratively test and learn from a process of futures exploration. In our eyes, a prototype of the future could be something as grand as a full-scale immersive simulation, or something as small as a future publication or hypothetical artefact.

Our menu for Futures Prototyping

There are many different reasons to employ a Futures Prototyping approach. In policy work, it can help to understand and illustrate the possible impacts of certain legislations or changes. In service or product development, it can pilot an experiential world built around new innovation. In research, it can engage stakeholders and unveil valuable insights about the future. And in our everyday environments and organisations, it can provide a way to co-create the futures we want more actively together.

Depending on your main objective for prototyping the future, we have developed a menu of approaches based on two key questions:

Is your objective to create insights for critical thinking, imagination and development, or do you want to strategically implement and accelerate transitions?
Are you exploring the future from an insular level (i.e. focusing on material innovation and tangible artefacts or services of a possible future), or are you taking a high-level approach that understands the larger systemic world of this innovation’s future?

Both of these questions can be answered along a spectrum, moving from more speculative to concrete test spaces on our Y axis, and from more material to socio-technical scales along our X axis. A simplified version, however, presents four key pathways:

Future Simulations focus on testing out and collecting feedback on a future vision that stems from your intervention, innovation or project within its natural setting. It may look like a service simulation, or immersive experience that combines spatial design and interactive artefacts with feedback mechanisms.

Future Sampling also exists in this more material level, but presents a more abstract and open future. Rather than service or product prototypes, it might include speculative artefacts or systems that act as probes to collect insights around reception, use, response, challenges. This approach is great for earlier iterative design stages.

Future Impact zooms out and looks to understand how an intervention or concept might accelerate transitions towards a certain future, by situating it in the context of the wider world and society. This approach asks how an intervention might change surrounding systems, trends, cultures and behaviours, and what the unintended consequences might be. This kind of prototyping works well with methods such as role play, storytelling and speculative artefacts.

Future Voyage is the most abstract of all the approaches, and works at a high systemic level where stakeholders can work together to travel to the future and explore possibilities together in connection to a concept, question or idea. This approach focuses on critical thinking and explorative conversation, and can use methods such as storytelling, collective visioning and role play.

Alongside these pathways, we’ve collected a rich and diverse library of case studies (including our own work and other fantastic projects that touch on Futures Prototyping), and have developed some workshop canvases to support teams in planning their Futures Prototyping journey and objectives. We launched these in a lecture and workshop with VTT’s IBEX teams in February: