FUTURE GAZING
TEAM
Extrapolation Factory (Chris Woebken, Saralee Sittigaroon), Deep Science Ventures (Aaron Appleton, Eirini Malliaraki)
MY ROLE
Lead Designer
KEYWORDS
FUTURES, SPECULATIVE DESIGN, DESIGN FICTION, PARTICIPATORY FUTURES, LEARNING GAMES, CURRICULUM DESIGN
ABOUT
Future Gazing is a virtual game where participants work together to dream up a successful venture in a future scenario. It is an exercise designed to help players work backwards from a desired objective, see the many pathways possible to get there, as well as the many factors that play a part in determining a pathway. The game acts as a way of introducing futuring concepts such as the STEEP model, backcasting, inflection points, and the 2x2 scenario matrix.
PROCESS
I worked with Extrapolation Factory on this project for Deep Science Ventures (DSV). DSV was launching a new PhD program called the Venture Science Doctorate, where candidates learn to design their own projects and launch companies based on their research. They came to us to create six ‘playful experiences,’ each of which would each introduce the six distinct phases of their curriculum to the PhD candidates.
We began designing each playful experience by first teaching ourselves the curriculum and extracting the core concepts for each phase. For the second phase of their curriculum, DSV wanted to teach students the importance of working backwards from an ideal future state and that there are many viable pathways to get to an end result. We created Future Gazing as a way of helping students learn this experientially.
OUTCOMES
For Future Gazing, all players choose one predefined problem area (such as “reduce Earth’s temperature by 1.5 C by 2050) and then each team works through the board to come up with a possible pathway to address this problem. Using techniques such as Madlibs style prompts, collaging, and combinatory play, each team create scenarios in which a speculative venture of their design has been successful at achieving this outcome. In the final part of the game, each team has 1 minute to pitch their speculative venture idea to the facilitator, who chooses a winner based on creativity, completeness, and scale of impact.
LEARNINGS
One struggle we had throughout all the games we designed for DSV was finding the balance between literally creating mechanisms to teach these complicated concepts to the PhD students vs. designing more abstract interpretations. This process involved much iteration and prototyping, fine tuning our process by tweaking how many factors to use as input to create an interesting enough 2x2 matrix and resulting scenario.