Learning from the Futures: Speculative Design tools in Service Design

Give things time, and they will change.

“Time is a measure of Change”, said Aristotele many centuries ago — a necessary canvas that gives things the space to evolve. A physicist may reply that, indeed, it is change that is a measure of time: we have always experienced its passing by measuring some sort of change: in the position of our Sun in the sky, in the rotation angle of clock hands, or in the vibrational state of subatomic particles. We can reconcile these points of view by saying that, simply, things change over time. If we could travel forward in time, we would see a different world — the further we would go, the more drastic change we’d see.

Our work as Service Designers is no exception: it is changing over time, as do the contexts in which it is applied, the process we use and the tools we adopt with our ever-changing practice, as we better equip ourselves to face the complex challenges of an ever-changing world. Among the instruments that have been added to our toolkit, some let us travel forward in time, to briefly experience what could be the change that’s coming. This is the case for the tools borrowed from Speculative Design.

In the past year, the team of Service Design Tools explored how service designers all around the globe are adopting Speculative Design Tools: we collected articles, talks and case studies, talked with 9 pioneers of Speculative/Service Design, analyzed their process and distilled insights, in order to understand the reasons and ways in which Speculative Design tools are being applied in their service design practice design of services.
In this article you can read a synthesis of our research, and discover:

1. the reasons and value of materializing and experiencing possible futures;
2. how service designers have integrated this practice in their work;
3. a collection of case studies that show the many ways in which this integration happens;
4. a list of actionable tips to start using speculative futures to design for your (and your clients’ / and everyone else’s) most desirable future.

If you care about the future, here is why should care about Speculative Design

Speculative Design is a tool that can help you find the inspiration, motivation, and agency to design (for) a world other than the one we live in: a world that overcomes those global issues that are threatening our very existence in the future, like climate crisis, social inequalities, shortage of resources or unsustainable production.

Through Speculative Design, you will tune-in and experience the different futures that lay ahead of us, and unlock your ability to see how the world may -and will- change with time. As a result, you will realize that radical change is not only possible — it is, in fact, already happening; and engaging intentionally in this practice can support you in working against the emergence of destructive futures and enable desirable ones.

A bicycle graveyard in China, showing how, without an intentional forward-looking strategy, even a post-possession paradigm of green vehicles can become an unsustainable service (© Bloomberg, recolored)

Speculative Design in a nutshell

At its core, Speculative Design is a practice of critical reflection on the potential consequences of our technological development. It uses design as a probe to explore, enact and discuss possible futures, ignite a discussion around their meaning and desirability, and create more awareness on how choices and actions in the present impact their realization. Let’s start our exploration of Speculative Design by describing its general process.

Phase 1: Detect the futures in the present.
The Speculative Design process starts with building a world somehow different than the one we live in. It generally situates scenarios in the near/far future, and shapes them by imagining how the present may evolve over time. It does that not only considering the trends of today, but also those events that are not trends yet, may never become one, but that talk about how the world is changing. These events are referred to as Weak Signals of Change.

Quote from a Speculative designer

You can scan for weak signals in the news, in scientific papers, in blogs, or in dedicated databases that foresighters and speculative designers have built ad hoc. Once you decide on which signals you want to focus on, its time to ask yourself: What would the world look like if the practices and events that nowadays are marginal become the norm in the future? By answering this question, you’re building the scenario of a speculative future.

🔮 No pressure: you’re not trying to predict the future, but to tune on a specific one among the many possible. So, feel free to play with signals independently on their probability of becoming the true future norm, and choose to focus on those that have potentially dangerous consequences on the domain you’re interested to explore.

Phase 2: Materialize one future in the present.
Next, you want to materialize fictional designs from such a world (like objects, service touchpoints, advertisement, media content, instruction manuals…) and use the design process and its outputs as gateways of discussion around the meanings of such a future.

Quote from a Speculative designer

These speculative designs, called design fictions or diegetic prototypes, are tangible fragments of the future scenario that tell a story about what it means to inhabit such a world. As design solutions from the future, they’re trying to solve a future problem — and encountering them sparks the question:

What problems are these the solution for?

The answer may refer to problems that do not yet exist, but that descend from the problems and solutions of the present and whose dependence and entanglement may otherwise remain tacit and overlooked.

Phase 3: Learn from the future, for the present.
The Speculative Design process culminates in an embodying moment of interaction with the design fictions, to ignite a discussion around the experience they mediate and to make explicit this genealogy of present and future criticalities. We’re now ready to go back to the present.

The expedition into the future of Speculative Design isn’t done only for fun (even if it can be pretty funny) or to thoroughly criticize the paths of progress (even if it can be pretty critical). We stepped into an alternative reality to experience how the world could be, and to know better what we want (or don’t want) the future to become. We can now use this information to “operationalize the present”, and direct our actions towards a more conscious and intentional design of the future.

Quotes from Speculative designers

Now that you know what a Speculative Design process consists of, let’s see how it is used in the real world.

Speculative Design in the real world

For many years after its formalization in the early 2010s, Speculative Design lived mostly between academia and art galleries, given its proudly professed independence from an immediate market utility. Yet, the future is something everyone is interested in — markets included — and Speculative Design found a legitimate application in the practice of designers, in many different ways. Let’s now trace the contours of its adoption and adaptation, before introducing some case studies that explicitly relate to Service Design.

“Mitigation of Shock” by Superflux, a Speculative Design project that materializes an apartment from a future disrupted by climate change.

Speculative Design as a tool for Strategy

Speculative Design has been framed and offered as a more experimental alternative to classic foresight for the exploration of future scenarios.

The differences among these approaches derive from two peculiar aspects of the Speculative Design method and mindset:

• the realization of the diegetic prototypes, that simulate the experience of the scenario and increase the “empathy for the future”;
• its exoneration from defining the most probable among futures (like foresight would do), while rather admitting an expanded plurality of what’s possible.

Quotes from Speculative designers

When Speculative Design becomes a tool for strategy, clients looking for strategic guidance are invited to take part in the process of defining scenarios, realizing design fictions, and reflecting upon them — facilitated by the (speculative) designer.

By going through the process, participants expand their perception about which futures are possible, they build a clearer vision of which, among them, are the most desired ones, and get empowered to take strategic decisions about what makes sense to start, continue or stop developing as a company in order to direct the evolution of the present towards the preferred direction.

Speculative Design as a tool for anticipatory prototyping

Speculative Design is, almost by definition, a process of research through design, where design itself is the method of inquiry. This means that by doing Speculative Design we have the chance to discover something that we may not discover by simple reasoning. Designers can leverage this superpower, and use a speculative approach to envision, visualize and prototype design concepts radically new.

Speculative prototyping grants designers the freedom to materialize solutions that can’t be developed yet, but whose experience can be anticipated to reflect on what will be possible in the future, and accelerate the path of its perfection and realization.

Quotes from a Speculative designer and Design Fiction researcher

In this case, the Speculative Design process is an internal job that the design team embarks on, and that confronts them with the implication, limitations, and blind spots of future designs. By going through the process, designers bend the time constraints and the boundaries of their imagination, landing on insights and ideas otherwise unreachable. This can not only inform product strategy, but can inspire the addition and refinement of features in today’s projects.

Speculative Designs as research probes

Speculative Design has also been used as a research tool for design, to investigate limits, fears, and hopes about the evolution of the present and generate insights about the future reactions to disruptive technologies.

Imagining the future can be a hard task, especially when it comes as a request during research interviews. Also, an open-ended question about future expectations or fears can generate answers containing tacit users’ assumptions about what the future is. On the other hand, a closed-end question can suffer from the researchers’ assumptions.

Quote from a Speculative Anthropology researcher

A way out from this impasse is to present to research subjects a speculative probe. In reaction to a potentially absurd object, users will interpret it. The speculative artifact acts as a boundary object to enable greater intelligibility of responses and reveal the mental models and value structures underpinning the interpretation process.

Quote from a Service/Speculative designer

If you’re starting to feel dizzy, hold on. It’s time for some examples from the Service Design practice.

Speculative Design in Service Design: Case Studies

Let’s now look at some case studies about the use of Speculative Design in Service Design, that will help you understand the potentialities of adopting this approach with tangible examples from fellow practitioners.

If by the end of this roundup you will still be curious to know more, you will find links to these and other case studies at the end of the article, along with a suggested reading list.

Better Care in the Age of Automation

• project by: SuperFlux
• year: 2019
• description: speculated services to support strategic recommendations
• parter/client: Doteveryone

Speculative Design — Service Design — Case Study: pic from the project Better Care in the Age of Automation, by Super Flux, showing a data wall about access through technology and tele-medicine pictures

Context

The Speculative Design agency Superflux was hired by the think tank Doteveryone to explore the potential consequences of the implementation of new technologies for healthcare.

Process

Superfux started by doing extensive research about the present crisis in care, new possible social and economic models, the role of an aging population, emerging technologies, and legal frameworks. From this, they created a near-future scenario and a speculative service as a prototype, called “National Care Service”. This service concept of care assistance is strongly focused on technological solutions like telemedicine and voice recognition, which created a space to discuss the frictions that a decrease in human interaction in health management may create. They touched on topics like accessibility, medical profession ethics, policy requirements, bureaucracy, and shared economy of devices. Doteveryone inserted this contribution in their bigger project, culminating in recommendations for the future developments of the healthcare system in the UK.

Technologies may solve problems, but the need for human connection is an eternal and essential requirement that can never be replaced. Whatever technology-based systems we build to help us care for each other must incorporate this idea at their core.

The Emergency Department waiting room

• project by: Monash University
• year: 2020
• description: Speculative Service Design framework

Speculative Design — Service Design — Case Study — Picture from the project Emergency Department waiting room by Monash University, showing a graphic novel in which a couple interacts with an emergency-room triage totem powered by AI. The totem asks the couple to place their hand on the logo to get started.

Context

Researchers at Monash experimented with the use of Speculative Design as a means to explore and interrogate future service experiences. They formalized a framework, called Speculative Service Design, and used the service experience of hospital emergency waiting rooms and the use of AI technologies as a context of use for this methodology.

Process

The framework they propose is composed of three steps. The first is problem exploration, or discovery, where stories of actual service experience are collected through classic and participatory research techniques. The second step is creative extrapolation, or prototyping, dedicated to the materialization of a speculative service. The Speculative Service Designer starts from observed pains to generate plausible, yet future-oriented, solutions to be prototyped. They prototyped service touchpoints, like AI-guided totems for emergency triage, and produced service artifacts like journeys and blueprints to uncover the service experience and mechanics. Finally, there is a step of consequence evaluation: the speculative service prototypes are used in round table discussion with stakeholders (like patients and carers) to discuss, identify and resolve the preferable attributes of future services, with the aim to spark more intentional future service interventions.

Speculative Service Design is used as a vehicle to proactively reflect on service experience futures before they happen. In doing so, the framework provides designers with a method to unpack the ideologies and philosophies that drive the development and deployment of technology.

Gold Coast City Futures Forum

• project by: Relative Creative
• year: 2019/2020
• description: city-wide speculative workshop for the collaborative envisioning of sustainable futures
• client/partner: City of Gold Coast

Speculative Design — Service Design — Case Study — Picture from the project Gold Coast City Futures by Relative Creative, showing a girl playing beside a cultural probe of participatory future design in the city of Gold Coast, mentioning themes emerged during research: diverse housing, waste management, bushfires, green new deal.

Context

Relative Creative is a service design agency with a great interest for sustainability. They organized the Gold City Futures Forum, where citizens and experts in social sciences, urban design, energy and agro-food technologies came together to envision sustainable futures for their communities.

Process

This project started with an involvement of citizens and local business to express hopes and fears about the future sustainability of Gold Coast City and the world, using cultural probe kits. The insights coming from these contributions informed the design of a workshop of collective envisioning around the themes of agro-economy, transportation, food, tourism and culture in the city. For the workshop, the team used a mapping tool called Cognitive Redirective Map, to visualizes the casual relations between past, present, and future, detect the emergence of potentially destructive scenarios, and help in defining corrective actions that can redirect the trajectory of the present towards more desirable and sustainable futures. The workshops culminated in the realization of design fictions that materialized the possible appearance of these corrective actions, and that became the starting point for new design briefs and community initiatives.

There is a ground swell of community members (including experts) who recognise the importance of a just transition and are yearning for spaces where meaningful action can begin and be supported. […] The design briefs that developed out of the Gold Coast City Futures Forum provide some great places to start.

Useful tips to apply Speculative Design in your Service Design practice

In conclusion, we want to share some practical advice coming from the experience of experts we interviewed and case studies we analyzed, and that are already using Speculative Design in their practice.

1. Co-futuring

Invite all stakeholders to colonize the visions of the future
Service Designers apply Speculative Design in a participatory way with clients and end users to uncover their tacit knowledge and hopes about futures.

Why?
It can enrich the relevance of the speculation, legitimize later design decisions and ignite a stronger motivation to change.

2. Scan the future

Detect weak signals from benchmark research
Look for weak signals of change along with trends and case studies during your benchmark & desk research.

Why?
It can reveal drivers of change, inspire innovative service concepts and future-proof solutions.

3. Make it tangible

Don’t skip the prototyping step of Speculative Design.
Design Fictions, or other tangible artifacts, enable the conversation among stakeholders around different visions of the future.

Why?
Prototypes can be an exit point for tacit knowledge, mediate the communication of diverse perspectives and reveal elements of the future that are relevant today.

4. Dystopia, Utopia and the Boring Future

Use different visions of the future.
The different “flavors” of the future that we can produce, like dystopia, utopia or a boring future, all have a utility that may serve the Service Design process.

Why?
Utopia defines the desired direction of design efforts.
Dystopia elicits conversations around barriers and unwanted consequences.
Boring futures provide the most plausible (paradoxically, interesting) scenarios.

5. Going stealth mode

Do Speculative Design, but don’t necessarily call it like that.
Sometimes, it is better to avoid a strong emphasis on Speculative Design with clients, but to rather focus on the desirable outputs of applying it.

Why?
Speculative Design may be perceived negatively by clients that may not see its usefulness at first and be afraid that it may distract you from considering their business needs.

Conclusions

👏 Great job!👏

By arriving at the end of this article:

• you have been primed to the process of Speculative Design;
• got an idea of how it can be used in the design practice;
• saw some examples of its application in Service Design;
• received tips & advices from fellow Service Designers on how to best marry it with your practice.

You’re now ready to add Speculative Design to your tool box, and start designing deeply desirable futures. In fact, our conclusion at the end of this research is that ultimately, Speculative Design itself is the tool we need:

• we can use it to have different conversation at the beginning of projects, to re-scope them after a brief experience of the future;
• we can use it with our team, to brainstorm new ideas;
• we can take small pieces of it, like signal scanning or design fictions, to expand the breath of our research;
• we can use it to redirect the impact of our job efforts towards something we truly believe in;
• we can use it to shape our own careers;

and, of course we can use it to design (for) a more desirable tomorrow.

Speculative Design is also rich in sub-tools, like back-casting, signal databases, design fictions, systemic mapping, and many more. You can find some of them in the Service Design Tools collection.

Our hope is that the efforts in putting together this information can inspire and support the continuous evolution of our practice as Service Designer, and let us all become true catalysts of the change we hope to see in the world.

Acknowledgments

A special and huge thanks goes to the amazing designers that made themselves available for our experts interviews, shared with us their methods, tips, passion and enthusiasm, and made it possible for us to combine their experience and knowledge in the content that we hope you just enjoyed.

External Links to Case Studies:

• Better Care in the Age of Automation by SuperFlux
• Rehearsing last-mile delivery services by Designit
• The Emergency Department waiting room by Monash University

Additional Case Studies:

Speculating on the Future of Railway

project by: Strange Telemetry
year: 2016
description: speculative probes for user research to inform policy making
client/partner: Gov.UK Policy Lab, Superflux
link: Speculating on the Future of Railway by Strange Telemetry

Gov.Futures: exploring the future of governments

project by: Studio Wé
year: 2018
description: co-creation of speculative scenario and artifacts for design strategy and policy making
client/parter: IBM Studio
link: Gov.Futures by Studio Wé

Suggested readings

Speculative Design:

• Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby; Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming, The MIT Press, [2013].
• James Auger; Speculative Design, Crafting the Speculation, Digital Creativity [2013].
• Bruce Tharp, Stephanie Tharp; Discursive Design Basics: Mode and Audience, Nordic Design Research Conference [2013].
• Leon Karlsen Johannessen; The Young Designer’s Guide to Speculative and Critical Design, [2017].
• Cameron Tonkinwise, Just Design: Being Dogmatic about Defining
  Speculative Critical Design Future Fiction, [2015].
• J Paul Neeley, Speculative Design Designing future products and services to understand the impact of emergent tech and trends, https://www.jpaulneeley.com/speculative-design
• Elliot P Montgomery, Chris Woebken, Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual [2016]
• Angelica Fontana, Forget Artefacts. Design Speculative Lifeworlds instead! [2021] [link]

Speculative Design for design research:

• Joseph Lindley, Dhruv Sharma, Robert Potts; Anticipatory Ethnography: Design Fiction as an Input to Design Ethnography, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings [2014].
• Stuart Candy, Kelly Kornet; Turning foresight inside out: An introduction to ethnographic experiential futures, Journal of Futures Studies [2019].
• Mike Michael; De-signing the object of sociology: Toward an ‘idiotic’ methodology, Sociological Review [2012].
• Andrea Gaspar; Teaching Anthropology Speculatively, Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia [2017].

Speculative Design in Service Design:

• Antonio Cesare Iadarola, Antonio Starnino; Speculative Design and Service Design: A False Dichotomy, Touchpoint [2018].
• Zoë Prosser, Santini Basra; Futures Thinking: A Mind-set, not a Method; Touchpoint [2018].

Speculative Design for Sustainability:

• Gavin Melles; Critical Design Fictions of Sustainable Development: Beyond technological optimism, CHI 2020 [2020].
• Corina Angheloiu, Goldie Chaudhuri, Leila Sheldrick; Future Tense: Alternative Futures as a Design Method for Sustainability Transitions, Design Journal [2017].

Authors: Cristina Colosi + Service Design Tools Team (Yulya Besplemennova, Francesca Foglieni, Bryan Sabin, Lisa Cagnin)