Design imaginaries
Workshop toolkit
Introduction
Design has evolved over the past 20-30 years from a tradition of making to a process that includes systems, strategy and innovation for imagining potential, probable and possible futures. The tools adopted into design practice in service of design futures are adaptable and adoptable for teams of any size interested in creating alternative ways of knowing and achieving their organization's mission. This workshop is in two parts. It begins with a design premortem as a framing device for challenging and questioning our assumptions. The second activity builds on the understandings cultivated in the premortem and leverages them into an imagined future.
Design Futures
A strategic discipline that uses design to imagine possible futures. Instead of focusing on immediate solutions, design futures explores systems and societal structures through speculative scenarios.
Future proofing
The development of an agile, adaptable and resilient [team] that can easily shift priorities and strategies in response to unforeseen circumstances that may arise including: emergence of new technologies, market shifts or budget cuts.
Workshop goals
1
Learn a little bit about design futures.
2
Discover new tools for shifting perspectives.
3
Put futures thinking into practice.
Premortem
A premortem is a design tool that anyone can use in any setting or context to foresee challenges that we all face in our daily lives. It creates a safe space to ideate and acknowledge the possibility of failure in order to imagine and pursue success.
Premortem instructions
Part one
- Start by taking a minute to imagine a project you worked on that ended in absolute failure.
- Respond to each of the questions on the screen.
- For each response write down one item/idea/thought on a post-it. You should have one response per post-it.
Part two
- Consider how your and your groups responses relate to each other each other.
- Group your responses and identify the themes and or categories that have emerged.
Future storytelling activity
Cards and instructions
Future imaginaries storytelling
Part one - setting the stage
- Take your scenario card and read it out loud.
- Each person at the table should draw a role card.
- Read your constraint card out loud.
Part two - building your story
- You’ve been presented with a future scenario, a project that has failed. Your group’s job is to imagine a future in which that failure doesn’t happen.
- Each person should assume the role they’ve drawn and try to imagine that perspective in the scenario.
- Building on the ideas, themes and influences identified in the pre-mortem create a story, using the story spine worksheet provided, to construct an alternate future.
Note
You can have tables draw their scenario card from the deck when working with smaller groups. And the same goes for the constraint cards. For larger groups it's better to place one scenario card and one constraint card on each table.
