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The participants were given the raw materials to form a design fiction, and began taking the first steps in delineating those worlds. Ideas included time limits and immersion rooms that would help future users control the amount of spent plugged in. These got as detailed as particular interactions regarding how one begins a non-gendered interaction in a VR / AR / MR experience, by perhaps molding one’s own body out of a clay-like substance. By giving participants with related work and life experience the elements of a design fiction – technical as well as social contexts, immersive prompts, and a space to debate – new forms of the technology began taking shape based on the issues these worlds would confront. The context of their lives as designers and activists was funneled into these potential futures.
Figure 4. Augmented Realities workshop image
Figure 5. Augmented Realities workshop cards as prompts
While the Augmented Realities workshop was not an ethnographic research interaction, it does suggest other uses of the method in more structured projects. Having the raw materials of a design fiction available on hand, in this case VR, images, and card prompts, encourages investment by the group in their feedback. During research, these materials create a tangible reminder of what we need to learn, and encourage the team to engage in framing the problem space. Like Concept Kitchen above and the personal mobility case study below, there are also implications for participant and site selection. We can consider the environmental, behavioral, demographic, or other criteria that signals indicate may play a significant role in future worlds. Finally, people populate design fictions with their own past, present, and hoped for future. These methods push ethnography beyond its thoughtful consideration of the present moment, in order to begin investigating the future.
The Future of Personal Mobility
The third example demonstrates the benefits of this approach in a multi-phase program, in which the design fictions were able to inform not only prompts but also participant and site selection. This is the turning inside out of the context – the story of the design fiction into the stories of the real world – that allows the design fiction to be a tool for inquiry as well as a final product. This project dealt with personal mobility within a 15-year time horizon. Methods were informed by an anticipatory anthropology protocol, elements of scenario planning, speculative design, and ethnographic futures research (based on Textor’s work). The first phase used secondary and ethnographic research to create a set of four potential futures around mobility. For each of these futures, an animated narrative around a central character described their mobility story. For example, one narrative followed the lives of a family in a resource short, informal settlements. Communal bonds and technological changes like cryptocurrency and 3D printing allowed for the adaptation of community resources to move goods, create work, and stimulate the informal economy. This design fiction included the product ecosystem, but did not highlight it as the central element.
Figure 6. Two cardboard circles with removable stars on them that represent a user’s profile rank based on data such as social media, job reviews, and operation history. Higher rank gives you more access to tools, job offers, and other rewards. In the activity, the participant was asked to share their status with the interviewer, and in what situations they would or would not do so.
The four potential futures were then used to select locations and participants for additional ethnographic research. Essentially, the team scanned the world for a divergent set of environments, behaviors, and attitudes highlighted in the design fictions. The design fictions were also used as prompts in the field, particularly with subject matter experts. Informed by Textor’s EFR protocol, discussion questions included participants’ reactions to the fictions – the optimistic, pessimistic, and likely implications of such a future. For example, Nairobi represented a location with a high rate of informal settlements and informal economy. Infrastructure barriers encouraged technological leapfrogging like mobile payments, the design fiction turned inside out into a best guess current context. The overarching narrative, and ideas linked with these worlds, allowed participants to project their reaction to the underlying assumptions that informed the idea. On the surface, this looked and sounded like concept feedback. In the background, this allowed the team to tangibly explore the assumptions of the design fictions. Opportunity areas for the long-term emerged, as well as near-term designs representing the first step in these directions.
IMPLICATIONS
Looking across these case studies, implications emerge for the creation and interrogation of design fictions as a qualitative research tool. Rather than a finished provocation expressing the outcomes of a process, making and sharing a design fiction can be a valuable tool for generating insight and ideas. In particular, design fictions and ethnographic methodology shape each other through 1) influencing the selection of research sites and participants with the expertise and experience that provide analogies to the world of the design fiction, 2) using ethnography as a source to create design fictions, 3) introducing an ethnographic approach to analysis by comparing and contrasting the reactions of different viewers who co-create the design fiction, and 4) instilling branching, tension, and contradiction into the design process (as opposed to linear or even iterative processes).
The first productive intersection in these projects came from using elements of the design fiction to select locations and participants for ethnographic research, in order to respond to the challenge of researching future implications in the present context. In the language of futures thinking, this helped amplify the signals of the future that may be weak in the present, whether those signals take the form of technologies like cryptocurrency, attitudes around sharing and self-sufficiency, or a fragmented geopolitical system. The mobility project was able to investigate the assumptions of the design fictions through the context of participants’ experiences. For example, this included finding subject matter experts working in relevant contexts, such as fintech in Kenya and energy in Korea. The team also drew on the context of participants’ lives to explore the shape mobility might take. For example, shipping and delivery in Seoul, the capital city of Korea, a country recognized for infrastructure investments and high R&D spending. For the Augmented Realities workshop, participants with a background in social impact were invited for the expertise they had based on the context of their work. By reflecting on images and a set of cards listing emotions and activities, they began to infuse the space around the technology with narratives from their own lives. Concept Kitchen 2025 did not fully explore this territory, but revisiting the project might suggest setting up the kitchen in contexts suggested by the themes it explored, such as mindful consumption and multipurpose environments. For example, installing it in a co-op, utopian community, or dormitory and letting residents interact with it there. An EFR-oriented discussion guide could explore its applications: what would people do, store, prepare, and eat in this space? Who would be with them? What are the implications, benefits, or drawbacks of this speculative object assemblage in comparison to how they currently do things? By drawing on the contexts of selected people in selected environments, the narrative is catalyzed as though an additional character has arrived.
Ethnography is also a rich source for creating and populating the narrative of a design fiction. For example, in Concept Kitchen 2025 the student’s and participants’ aversion to food waste highlighted an emotion centered benefit of just-in-time and on-demand delivery by drones. Stories of political and economic instability in the mobility project played a role in giving the background of self-sufficient adaptations in one of the future worlds. This made the use of technology such as 3D printing self-evident, rather than the center of the narrative. The creation of the design fictions, telling the story of the world and why people behave the way they do, incidentally turned out to be a powerful tool for analysis. Rethinking patterns or contradictions as a person navigating them in that world helped sensemaking as much as identifying themes and experience mapping.
Speculative design practice and futures perspectives share the hope of provoking people to action. At the intersection of design fiction as a subgenre and applied ethnographic methods, comparing and contrasting individual reactions is a source of analysis and growth for the project. Lindley, J. et al. (2014) suggest studying the process, the audience, or the content of a design fiction. Following their suggestions, the team is part of the process of creating the design fiction. The audience includes other team members, research participants, and the client. During the Augmented Realities workshop, debate arose around whether replicating travel experiences for low income communities who otherwise couldn’t afford to travel would alleviate or exacerbate inequality. How would status, such as the social capital of having travelled to an exotic locale, translate to a virtual experience of a place? Is travel or movement in general a right or benefit? Would proposing a virtual alternative treat a symptom, rather than a cause, of economic and social inequality? Would this technology act as an opiate in a future world? Depending on their own class, race, and gender background, participants debated each side. In a next iteration, the values drawn from the present context, could inform a more preferable design fiction. During the mobility project, the design fictions assumed a particular role for the client’s product ecosystem. The narrative form allowed an exploration of the team members’ personal and professional history: what did they consider the socioeconomic class of their audience in comparison to regional demographic figures? Was this who they wanted to reach in the future and why? The animated, story-based narrative of a future user created just enough distance between the current state and future directions for these conversations. By comparing and contrasting the reactions of different creators and viewers of the design fiction, the inconsistencies and contradictions among their present contexts emerge. Whether a design fiction seems inevitable, preposterous, or desirable in the viewers’ eyes is as useful to a project team as the internal consistencies of the design fiction.
Design fictions encourage multiple viewpoints in their creation and interpretations. The openness of the form invites exploration and experimentation. In the projects above, teams co-created design fictions in the mobility project and the Concept Kitchen work. This required a consensus around what moments and themes were important to highlight in the worlds of each projects. The narrative form provides an alternative to analysis and synthesis methods such as pattern recognition, affinity mapping, and customer journeys. In the mobility project, having to write the narratives forced the team to consider what the most important elements were, what tone to take, and the background context such as social or economic signals. In the Concept Kitchen project, individual explorations by the students were a source of information for synthesis along with the primary research. The explorations revealed additional knowledge. For example, the Mindful Sink (Figure 3) offered different interactions to control intensity and temperature of faucet water flow. Design fictions used to illustrate multiple potential futures also provide a framework for analogous research done for inspiration, as well as multiple types of data like primary and secondary research and client documents. In applied settings such as product development, it can introduce branches in the design process. For example, self-sufficiency may mean a product that 3D prints its own parts and books maintenance appointments in one world and one that locates gig jobs for the user based on location in another. Varying interpretations inform analysis and synthesis, including which design directions to pursue.
The intersection of design fiction and ethnographic methods has limitations, primarily around subjectivity and strategy. Because the design fictions emerge from the team’s choices and fascinations, they are likely to include bias and assumptions that should be stated and accounted for during the interview and interpretation process. The design fictions should not be conflated with the strategy, rather the strategy emerges from the organization’s negotiating amongst multiple potential futures (Stuart Candy, personal communication). Finally, participant and site selection must be refined so that participant’s experience and expertise allows them to meaningfully absorb and react to the content of the design fiction. For example, if a narrative includes on the effects of AI the participant must be familiar with or prompted with additional content within or alongside the design fiction so they can respond to the positive, negative, and likely implications of the fiction.
CONCLUSION
Design fictions could become a ubiquitous research tool beyond provocations or high fidelity deliverables of a future vision. By definition fictional, their openness invites creation, interpretation, and discussion. Design fiction and ethnographic methods together can push and strengthen each other by creating a creative but rigorous scaffolding for interrogating expectations and reactions to the future. Design fiction can influence the activities, people, and places in which ethnography is done, and ethnography can create design fictions. While a design fiction depends on a self-contained world that makes the products, services, and interactions featured recede to allow a viewer’s contemplation of that world, its connection to present context is relevant and useful for the applied design process. Drawing connections and comparisons between the context of the design fiction world and that of the creator, viewer, or participant allows ethnography to generate new knowledge and bridge the gap between interrogating the future from the present.
Marta Cuciurean-Zapan applies her background in social science and visual art to inspire and change products and experience. She works with multi-disciplinary teams on projects which create new and meaningful connections to their customers, and to each other. She received her Master’s in Cultural Anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia. She has a B.A. in Anthropology and Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. Marta is currently a design researcher and Design Lead at IDEO. marta.cz@gmail.com
I would like to thank the IDEO team members who worked on the projects described above for their impact on the futuring perspectives that structure this paper. I would also like to thank Joshua Hauth, my co-facilitator for the Augmented Realities workshop series. The workshop was made possible with support from the Illinois Humanities Foundation, MAKE Literary Productions, and the Post Family. Special thanks to Julia Haines for the evolution of this paper and Stuart Candy for inspiration on these methods. Please note that the views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of IDEO or our clients.
NOTES
1 As covered in industry-oriented online publications such as Fast Company and The Verge.
2 Lindley, J. et al. 2014 on design ethnography approaches and Greenman, A. et al. 2006 on an “ethnographic walking tour” to enhance foresight exercises.
3 Textor describes tempocentrism as akin to ethnocentrism, in which we take for granted the situations and values of our own time frame (2005:17).
4 See profile on Tellart in The Verge, an online tech-oriented publication (Chayka 2017).
5 Including anticipatory anthropology, anticipatory ethnography and speculative design
6 At the launch of the speculative design major at the University of California, San Diego, Benjamin Bratton argues that these objects pose an alternative to the mainstream (2016).
7 “Such contributions will allow citizens, leaders and governments to make informed policy choices, and thereby improve their society’s or community’s chances for realizing preferred futures and avoiding unwanted ones.” (AAA website)
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