Strange Attractor

• Documented scenarios from the session, with the card combinations that generated them.
• Consequence maps per scenario: named beneficiaries and those made worse off, with human specificity.
• Tagged output from the group pass: Signals, Wants, Watches.
• For the full day: focused scenarios tied to something your organisation is actually working on.
• You get a few Design Fiction Kit decks that you can use to run your own ideation and consequence sessions.

You can either go in to this session with a clear product, relationship, attribute or trend — and we'll create material design fictions based on that – or we can use the Design Fiction Kit to generate completely novel material futures. A pre-session discussion allows us to decide on either or both.

The Design Fiction Kit process relies on four categories of concepts, and it is the Archetype card that is the mechanism that makes this different from every other futures exercise. It's an artefact brought back from the future — an information booklet, an ID card, a product manual — something with a function you recognise from today even though its form has changed. The Archetype is the stand-in for human need: it explains what the human conditions are that surround this material futures: who uses it, what it asks of people, who benefits, who is left behind.

Without positioning this future in a human context, material futures default to inventing interesting technology things that reflect your teams technical skill and imagination, but which doesn't challenge their thinking around how society works. The Archetype forces a position: this object exists in a human world, it serves someone specific, it has a social logic.

After each scenario is presented, the group does a consequence pass: who benefits from this future, and who is made worse off? The first level of each answer must name a specific person, group, or human condition — not a general effect. This prevents the session from producing abstract futures with no one in them. Humans are always effected by the futures that you create – by identifying as these effects as broadly as possible we can better identify your challenges and opportunities.

Half day — blue sky format: Scenarios are unconstrained. Ends with the consequence pass and a group tagging round: Signal (already happening somewhere), Want (worth working toward), Watch (worth keeping an eye on ).

Full day — focused format: The morning runs as a blue sky session to build comfort with the method. In the afternoon, we replace a few of the cards with something you want to examine deeper — a specific user, a technology, a context you're designing for. The consequence pass in the afternoon has a different quality, where participants are now accounting for real people and social contexts effected by something you're actually building.