Date: sep dec 2006.
Duration: 3 months
PARTICIPANTS: 6 INdustrial design MA STUDENTS
FACILITATORS: max munnecke, torben lenau & per boelskifte
Place: Technical University of Denmark

The assignment is to develop a creative worktool based on an exploration of the future innovative workplace.

The market for creative worktool has just recently emerged in the form of Method Cards (IDEO), Serious Play (LEGO) etc., but companies are under increasing pressure to innovate, so the market holds a lot of future potential.

Design consultancies have traditionally been developing concrete products, but as companies realize that it is a key competence they prefer to develop their own in-house design studios and ask consultancies instead to teach how to innovate ... and provide the creative worktools.

This project starts with an investigation of what is to come and develop a "Future Map" that give a broad overview of possible future developments and envision compelling future opportunities. One of these opportunities will then be further developed and be presented in detail.

>> introduction brief (pdf 0.1 mb)

The project is scheduled for 11 weeks of which the first 3 weeks is dedicated to developement of the "Future Maps". In the following weeks a specific business opportunity is pursued and transformed into a concrete concept.

The "Future Map" process is divide into the following tasks:

• Context Analysis:
  Ask yourself what you as a designer need to know about the future to envision future opportunities? Which factors and trends affect the questions? Search for information about the present, past and future.
  Make an overview of the most important insights from the whole analysis. Identify a range of future key conditions and explain the transition storylines.
• Scenario Development:
  Identify a range of future key conditions and explain the transition storylines. Describe the fundamental mechanismens and dynamics that exist within each key condition. Flesh out the scenarios.
• Opportunity Exploration:
  Brainstorm! Generate ideas for each scenario.
  What kind of opportunities do you envision? ... and discuss the value assumptions that lay behind these different areas of opportunities.
• Integrate Insights
  Integrate teh insights from the context analysis, scenarios and opportunities into a coherent map.

Context Analysis

During the first week a broad collection of information related to the theme "Future creatice worktools" is gathered. The information is processed into different categorize of factors and trends, and in an attempt to reduce complexity these elements are clustered according to meta-factors. Sets of trends are then composed into sense-making and interesting clusters that can form the skeleton for exciting future scenarios.

>> process slides (35 pages / pdf 1.7 mb)

Scenarios provide concrete descriptions of possible contexts of future product use. In future mapping about three to five key chains are developed into scenarios. Of course, new scenarios can be added at a later stage when desired. Means to make these scenarios explicit are dayin-the-life stories, historical timelines, newspaper front pages, personas, rich pictures, etc.

Future Maps

In this workshop we divide the "Future Map" into two sub-maps: trajectory map and opportunity map. The combination of the two provide an overview of future developments, scenarios and opportunities without cluttering too much information on the piece of paper. The two maps are also the direct result of two natural steps in the process towards making a future map and give focus to the tasks that the group is given.

Trajectory Maps

Trajectory maps show possible future trajectories (development paths or chains of trends and events) that may lead to each scenario (or more specifically the key conditions that are the foundation of the scenarios).

Opportunity Maps

The scenarios are further examined by exploring opportunities (and threats). The next map shows an overview of opportunities (concepts) within a specific scenario. Future products will already be part of the scenario visualisations made in the previous step, so the transition to this step will be fluid.

This needs to be done for all scenarios, but because this may be too much of a workload, then you should only do this for one scenario. It is recommended to focus on the scenario that is already elaborated for the previous home assignment. It will make it easier to work with and in total all three scenarios covered. The concepts have been grouped according to the scenario that they primarily relate to, but the concepts may overlap and it should not be seen as a strict division.

Among the all the envisioned scenarios and opportunities, a particular concept was selected for further development: The ProGame concept.

Lesson learned

The basic model - which consist of context analysis, scenario development and opportunity exploration – is not really up for debate. It serves the fundamental requirements and leave plenty of room for different methods and tools to be integrated.

Scenario development and opportunity exploration went according to plan, but the current set of tools are very traditional and do not meet the overall ambition of making the process transparent, fluid and comprehensive.

The focus and flow of the project seemed to work fine, - after the initial discussion of the intent. Some students complained about the a too wide area of focus, but I am sure that with a more thoroughly done workshop there will be time to refine the focus as you go along.

Next

The context analysis and selection of key forces feels forced and the resulting scenarios are difficult to position in a broader context. In the coming workshops the context analysis must be given more time and if possible a more "sense-making" approach than trend-thinking may be introduced.