What is Design Fiction?

Design Fiction is a narrative method that helps decision makers visualize the potential results of decisions, based on speculative and fictional scenarios of the future, woven from the threads visible today.

When should you use Design Fiction?

Design Fiction is most useful for navigating unknown and uncertain situations, ranging from the design of new products to developing long term business strategies for markets that change rapidly.

How Technology fuels uncertainty in businesses.

New technologies bring in massive efficiencies, which lead to faster adoption by the market. This shortens the innovation cycle and puts tremendous pressure on product and business teams and their execution speeds.

Accenture’s Pulse of Change: 2024 Index, indicates that technology is the number one cause of Business Change. Source

This pressure eventually affects all teams downstream, ranging from product management to talent acquisition and development.

How Design Fiction helps teams handle ambiguity

Traditional methods and tools for growing a company often fall short when it comes to dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. While these conventional approaches work well in known situations, they provide little guidance when facing the unknown.

Design fiction can be a powerful tool in such situations. It draws on narrative techniques from science fiction, facilitates the exploration of potential future scenarios. By envisioning plausible yet provocative visions of the future, organizations can better orient themselves and make more informed decisions.

The Power of Design Fiction, and why leading organizations use it.

Have you ever observed how ideas in science-fiction books and movies from the past have become reality today?

Fiction writers and concept artists are fantastic at forecasting the future, and this magical ability depends on two things – a vivid imagination and the ability to make futuristic concepts plausible. To make a futuristic idea plausible, storytellers have to anchor it to ideas that we know and recognize today. This is what makes Design Fiction so powerful.

Source: The Pocket Telephone / An Comic Strip from 1919 predicts the mobile phone.

The more modern origins of design fiction can be traced back to the 1960s, when authors and filmmakers began using speculative storytelling to imagine technological and societal changes. Over time, this approach has evolved and been adopted by the design and business communities as a way to drive innovation.

Leading organizations are already harnessing the power of design fiction. For example, Amazon famously asks its product managers to write hypothetical press releases for future products, forcing them to envision the customer experience and benefits before development even begins.

Source: Video by Nick Foster – Head of Design at Google X and partner at Near Future Laboratory

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