A practitioner’s manual
Everything in the series turned into a process you can run: eight steps, four futures to choose from, a one day workshop, and the four ways it goes wrong.
What’s this about?
Nine articles of theory, history, cases and criticism come down to one practical question: how do you actually do this? This final part is the manual. It assumes no budget, no gallery and no permission, and it works whether you have a single afternoon or a six month project.
Read on if you:
- Want to run your first speculative or transition project and need a sequence to follow
- Are planning a workshop and want an agenda that produces something, not just sticky notes
- Need a way to choose a scenario on purpose rather than by instinct
- Would like to know in advance how these projects usually fail
A warning before the method. Everything below is a scaffold, not a recipe. The projects in the seventh and eighth articles did not follow a numbered list; they were made by people who had internalised the moves and then improvised. Use this to get started, and expect to abandon the sequence once you can feel what the project wants.
The eight steps
01 Frame the question
Write one sentence beginning “what if” or “what happens when”. Two rules. It should be about a tension people already feel, not about a technology you find interesting. And it should be specific enough that you could name the people it affects. “What if AI changes work” is not a question; it is a topic. “What happens to a small town’s GP surgery when the nearest doctor is three hundred kilometres away and the triage is automated” is a question.
02 Gather signals
Speculation that is not grounded is just invention. Spend real time collecting what is already happening: policy drafts, patents, pilot schemes, prices, job adverts, complaints. Then talk to people who live inside the tension and ask what they expect, what they want and what they fear. Those three answers are your raw material, and they are usually more surprising than anything you would have invented.
03 Choose a future, deliberately
Most people default to a mild extrapolation of the present, which produces the dullest possible project. Jim Dator, who led the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, observed that essentially all scenarios fall into four generic types: continuation, collapse, discipline and transformation. Choose one on purpose, say why, and notice what the other three would have shown you.
04 Pick the frame
As the case studies showed, the frame does half the work. A shop, a kitchen, a bus stop, a letter from a council, a news bulletin, a product manual, a school report. People already know how to behave inside these, so the future becomes something they inhabit rather than something they are shown. Choose the frame before you design the object, because the frame decides what the object has to be.
05 Build the artefact
The craft here is mundanity. Believability lives in the boring details: a reference number, a tariff, a disclaimer, wear on a corner, an instruction nobody would invent. Resist the urge to make it beautiful. As Tonkinwise argued in the previous article, polish and provocation tend to work against each other, and a slightly shabby artefact that looks used will out-perform a perfect render every time.
06 Keep the perceptual bridge
James Auger gave this idea its name in 2013. A speculation needs a bridge between the audience’s perception of their world and the fictional element of the concept. Go too far and people cannot place themselves in it, so they watch rather than enter. Practically: keep almost everything recognisable and change one thing. The single changed element is where the argument lives.
07 Stage the encounter
Decide who meets this, where, and in what frame of mind. A colleague at a desk, a stranger in a corridor, a committee in a meeting room and a shopper in a queue will give you four different projects. This is also where the ethics from the previous article apply: consent, a way out of distressing material, and somebody present who can talk.
08 Capture and connect
Record what people actually said, including the reactions that contradict your thesis, especially those. Then do the step that almost everyone skips: hand the material to someone who can act on it. A team deciding a roadmap, a department writing a policy, a community group with a meeting next month. Without this the project ends as an interesting afternoon.
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The loop
Stuart Candy and Kelly Kornet set out a cycle for exactly this, which they call ethnographic experiential futures: Map people’s existing images of the future, optionally Multiply them with alternatives, Mediate them into tangible experiences, Mount those experiences for people to encounter, then Map the responses and feed them back in. Steps 02 and 08 above are the two ends of that loop.
A one day version
If you have a single day with a group, this agenda produces one rough artefact and a real conversation around it. It works with six to twenty people and costs the price of cardboard.
Three things make the difference between this working and not working. Keep the question fixed after the morning, or the group will redesign it all day. Force the build to start before anyone feels ready, because discussion expands to fill whatever time it is given. And protect the last hour, since that is where the only real output of the day is produced.
What to have in the room
- Cardboard, tape, paper, scissors, marker pens. Nothing that needs a power socket.
- A printer, if you can, because a printed form or label makes almost anything look official.
- Blank versions of real things: envelopes, luggage tags, packaging, ID cards, receipts.
- One person whose only job is to write down what participants say.
Four ways it goes wrong
Too far is the beginner’s mistake: a future so distant that nobody can reach it from where they stand, so the response is admiration instead of argument. Too flat is the corporate version: a deck describing a future rather than an object from inside one. Too clean is the most dangerous, because it looks like success. A world with no friction, no losers and no awkward trade-offs is a brochure. And too quiet is the most common of all: the work is finished, people like it, and nothing changes, because step 08 never happened.
Where this leaves the series
Ten articles in, the shape of the argument is this. Design spends almost all its effort on the probable future, the one that extends the present. Speculative design makes other futures tangible so that we can argue about them. Transition design takes the argument and tries to move a real system towards a different one, slowly, locally and with the people who live there. Neither half is sufficient alone. A provocation with nowhere to go is theatre, and a transition project without a vivid image of the future it wants will default to the present with better processes.
The practical conclusion is unglamorous. Ask a sharp question. Ground it in what is already happening. Choose your future on purpose. Build something small and mundane and specific. Put it where people who are not you will meet it. Write down what they say, and give it to someone who can act. Then do it again on something that matters more.
Thank you
This is the last article in the series. If you have read this far, the most useful next step is not another article but a single afternoon spent making one cheap artefact from a future you find uncomfortable, and showing it to somebody who will tell you the truth about it.
Sources and further reading
Method
› Dator, J. (2009). Alternative Futures at the Manoa School. Journal of Futures Studies, 14(2). https://jfsdigital.org/articles-and-essays/2009-2/vol-14-no-2-november/articles/futuristsalternative-futures-at-the-manoa-school
› Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11 to 35.
› Candy, S. & Kornet, K. (2019). Turning foresight inside out: An introduction to ethnographic experiential futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3). https://jfsdigital.org/articles-and-essays/vol-23-no-3-march-2019/turning-foresight-inside-out-an-introduction-to-ethnographic-experiential-futures/
› Montgomery, E. P. & Woebken, C. (2016). Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual.
› Irwin, T. & Kossoff, G. (2017). Mapping Ojai’s Water Shortage. Workshop briefing books, Carnegie Mellon University.
Background to the whole series
› Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.
› Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. The Sustainability Institute. https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
› Irwin, T. (2015). Transition design: A proposal for a new area of design practice, study, and research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229 to 246.
› Mitrović, I., Auger, J., Hanna, J. & Helgason, I. (eds.) (2021). Beyond Speculative Design: Past, Present, Future. SpeculativeEdu. https://speculativeedu.eu/beyond-speculative-design-past-present-future/
› Transition Design Seminar, Carnegie Mellon University. https://transitiondesignseminarcmu.net/
