Futuring the future
Creating a place value for design futuring in a User researcher’s toolkit
Until 2023, my design education was largely self-informed, fuelled by books, journals, and conference proceedings. In 2019, a workshop introduced me to Critical Design Fiction, a method for envisioning wildly improbable futures. The workshop pushed me to radically imagine possibilities beyond the status quo, unburdened by questions of feasibility. In the following months, I even co-authored a paper with professors from India and Finland titled “Reimagining Friendships and Romance in the Time of Pandemic Using Design Fiction”.
However, once the workshop was done, I went back to shying away from telling people about the workshop and my tryst with critical design and design futuring because I kept thinking , “What’s the point? How is any of this going to change how people build products and approach problems?” So, that avenue remained unexplored, locked and shut — and only resurfaced from time to time when I would wistfully imagine myself “innovating” and “creating” new ideas and unheard-of solutions.
Witnessing the limitations of current design solutions
While working as a UX researcher for a leading Indian Educational technology platform, I became acutely aware of how product decisions were made. New features were often derivative, following the mantra of “make it like product X, but slightly better”. Working across diverse business units on strategic and tactical projects, my team and I frequently felt the limitations of our recommendations. We started with incremental improvements for existing products, but also explored the evolving user landscape in learning technologies. This broader perspective allowed us to assess if a concept warranted becoming a product. However, I constantly questioned our self-imposed constraints (owing to the business and technological feasibility) that stifled our design potential and, consequently, the organisation’s ability to pursue groundbreaking solutions.
Furthermore, I recognised that many problems were deeply intertwined with the social, technological, and political landscape. Sometimes, truly fixing them could threaten the organization’s core business model. The very problem we were aiming to solve might be what the platform profited from.
Design Futuring: the secret-sauce to become future-ready
Now as a student being academically trained in design, prior knowledge of research, stakeholder collaboration and the power of adapting research methods and design is helping me think and find ways to conduct research to inform my design approaches. An academic environment is encouraging a culture of questioning and challenging established processes. It is fostering a safe space for exploration, experimentation and encouraging me to push the boundaries of design methods and practices by moving on from “what should be done” to considering “what are all the possible ways it can be done”.
In a system that desired to build future-facing products, the belief that there was only one “correct” product solution that could and should be built contradicted the vision. Design Futuring is paramount to help product teams break out of their silos and envision a multitude of ways to address a problem, ultimately leading to a more flexible and innovative approach to product development.
My background in user research has instilled a core belief: there’s no one-size-fits-all design solution. Every product is shaped by a unique interplay of user needs, organizational constraints, and underlying values. This diversity isn’t a limitation, but a strength. My industry experience equipped me to bridge the gap between different teams, while academia fostered a passion for participatory and design futuring approaches. Simply put, I’m a strong advocate for user voices in the design process.
“There is no one-size-fits-all design solution. Every product is shaped by a unique interplay of user needs, organizational constraints, and underlying values. This diversity isn’t a limitation, but a strength.”
As a researcher, I strive to co-create custom solutions with stakeholders, organizations, and communities. These solutions will be specific to the context — a product of the environment and values of both creators and users. Furthermore, I believe in building future-ready products that can evolve alongside their users. For physical products, this could look like minimising environmental impact through reusability, repairability, and longevity.
The futuring methods taught in this course have helped me develop a mental schema for tackling design problems- be it from critiquing an existing solution using the STEEP+V factors or building a future-facing solution(s) using the Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). Given where I currently see myself and the work that I aspire to do in the near future, I know I will be drawing from most of the futuring methods that I’ve been acquainted with during this course.
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As a designer, I will be using Jamais Cascio’s critiques as a core guiding principle in my design practice. Drawing from my lived experience as a UX researcher and Cascio’s critiques, I will strive to question and critique how products afford different functionalities and explore potential unintended uses. This will help me design for flexibility and user empowerment, allowing them to interact with products in ways that best suit their needs.
Futuring my Design Approach
As a UX Researcher I want to:
- Contextualize research: based on the nature of the business, its users and the organisational constraints by adapting and customizing research methods through participatory research and design activities
- Generate a deep user understanding: through sense-making stories from emic and etic perspectives, and by providing rich user insights which can be applied across different organisational levels and utilised by different teams
- Design sustainable and evolving experiences: through my research and help build products that not only last long, but are capable of adapting to the changing trends of the world and requirements of their users
I believe that the way I choose to leverage design and research will shape my design practice and define my philosophy. As a User Researcher, I need to explore all facets of a system and examine and deconstruct the ways in which an issue presents itself in the ecosystem. The STEEP framework will enable me to assess the issue through the lens of various social, technological, environmental, economical and political factors existing within/outside this system. Employing Cascio’s critiques will guide me and my team in positioning technology as a driver towards human empowerment over human dependency. Combining these methods will help me:
- Identify root causes at a system-level: by analyzing how external factors exacerbate existing problems within or outside the system, how users get affected by it, and discover ways of working around the issue.
- Prioritize User Needs: by honing in on how certain affordances and constraints in experiences influence user behavior, the unintended uses of technology and products
- Design responsible approaches to problems: by critically evaluating solutions to ensure they don’t disrupt the delicate balance within the ecosystem, and ensuring that technology serves humanity, not the other way around.
To build experiences that are robust and can adapt and find potential use cases in the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of the future, we will need to consider all the possible scenarios of our future. Introducing Jim Dator’s futures to my team will orient to the idea of multiple futures, and will help me design co-creation workshops and activities in order to ideate and generate experiences that are:
- Resilient : by withstanding potential disruptions in the ecosystem, and establish relevance in empowering users
- Adaptable : by being able to adjust and function effectively in multiple future contexts, and according to users’ evolving needs
The illustrated example below gives a sneak peek into one of the ways in which I imagine incorporating Jim Dator’s alternative futures when working with an existing brief given by a client. The project brief stated here is an interdisciplinary course project that I am working on here at Carnegie Mellon University. The ‘guiding prompts’ would be a product of our user research insights. The ‘Idea’, or ideas in this case (since ideally there should be multiple ideas generated for each future) would be based upon the guiding prompts and co-created with our stakeholders.
Dexign Futures — For best results, use when working in teams
Dexign Futures, as a course, taught me one of the most important skills that a designer must have in their toolkit — future-readiness. I believe that similar to design, ‘futuring’ can yield best results when applied in a collaborative setting. Since we can’t predict the future, we can at least try and be prepared for it by exploring all the diverse possibilities that it might manifest in, and then some. And what better way to do so, than to bring in diverse minds to collectively brainstorm all our possible, probable, plausible and preferable futures?
