Hi, my name is Felix Epp and I am presenting The Future Ripples Method on behalf of my co-authors
Tim Moesgen, Antti Salovaara, Emmi Pouta and Idil Gaziulusoy
HCI and design are future-oriented activities.
Large parts of research and practice in the field are oriented to inform the design of
future technologies and identify novel ways to support users.
Futures thinking has become increasingly important with the awakening to the global challenges
related to social, economic and environmental sustainability
Design has to take much broader and systemic considerations into account than only the
needs of the product’s end users.
Despite increasing research in speculative design and sustainable HCI, current practice
largely fails to understand and answer a call for holistic, systemic futures thinking.
We believe that the reason for the poor level of adoption of futures studies and foresight
methods is the their length.
A typical foresight process that aims for scenario building takes months to carry out.
only recently have scholars started to adapt foresight methodology in a rapid manner.
For example, Timelines by Wong & Nguyen. They integrated futuring methods to focus
values-based design
This paper adds to this development by focusing on innovation and product design teams.
We ask: What rapid method could enable innovation teams to improve the anticipatory capacity
of their invention processes?
We used reflective practice iterating over four workshops to develop our method,
including an external team of material scientist.
We adopted the popular Foresight method Futures Wheel, which visually brainstorms consequences
of changes in concentric circles.
We embedded our version of Futures Wheel into a full-fledged futures workshop including
framing and scanning activities.
Our method achieves two things: it offers a practical tool for innovation teams to map
out consequences in their ideation and development processes in addition, it activates anticipatory
capacities by stimulating competences essential for futuring. Our process builts on the metaphor
of ripples in a sea of possibilities.
The sea is an ideal metaphor for visioning with the volatility of its nature and the
land as a contrast that gives us a grounding.
The process consists of three phases and a follow-up: First, scanning the shore, then shoosing a pebble
and then creating the ripples, the main activity.
Once a team aligns on a common g oal, for example “We would like to brainstorm the consequences
of novel conversational user interfaces which we are developing”,
the process starts with a scanning activity.
In foresight, scanning tries to find observable signs of change in the present.
These changes can be in the form of trends, megatrends or weak signals.
Weak signals take a particularly important role in working on long-term futures, as they
indicate possible drastic changes that are not yet perceived as actual trends.
To allow depth in the scanning activity and integrating all participants, everyone prepares
2-3 topics before the group workshop.
At the beginning of the workshop every participants presents their topics to the group.
The next step in the process concerns the selection of the pebble: the starting point
for mapping out consequences.
The choice of the pebble is critical for the whole ripples process.
The pebble can be a weak signal, as we see in the example, as it was identified during scanning
or a concrete idea, for example “What if textiles would have self-repair capability?”
or even a more general exploration: “What if clothing would be based on living organisms in 10 years?”
The pebble then becomes the starting point for main activity of creating ripples.
The goal is to brainstorm consequences and impacts in the form of concentric ring segments.
The first ripple represents direct future consequences, and each further ripple describes
consequences of the preceding ripples.
In order to create a good flow for the brainstorming , we alternate individual brainstorming
with group discussion.
Before each participant places their most valued ideas on the board,
it has to be discussed with the group.
Internal coherence of the ripples is, here, more important than the quantity.
The group’s goal, afterall, is to map out the ripples of a change and how possible consequences
relate to each other.
Additionally, we use different categories like environement, legal, to also categorise better the diversity of futures.
The whole process is repeated at least three times until the diagram is saturated.
After this process, we suggest to use, for example, to use the Next Steps analysis
to generate some concrete outputs.
From developing this methods we had some pracitcal outcomes.
We saw how Future Ripples appeared to be of practical use to us and our participants.
For example, It helped the group of material scientists in identifying and drafting a research
proposal on memory textiles: Due to the the cross-linkage of the ripples and consequences,
and als the the scanning and framing stages the group was able to connect there far fetched future proposal
to changes observable in the present.
Also the broad variety generated with the STEEPLE categories was useful for them to find connection
points with other members of the consortium. However, facilitating futures thinking is hard,
whether through a method or by moderating.
One difficulty we found is self-efficacy, the perceived competence of the participants.
For example one author had particular struggle with this from the start.
She was new to foresight and some terminology was intimidating.
The metaphor
and clear steps then helped her, once we had introduced them.
Especially the scanning activity that connected to everyday knowledge outside of her professional expereince.
Further, mapping out uncertain paths went against her urge of problem-solving,
as using futures requires to consolidate both, closes and open-ended thinking.
These difficulties definitiely are something that the method still has to deal with.
This needs some further evaluation.
We invite others to use the method and tell us how it was working for them.
We provide for that a ready-made Miro template, so you can start right away. Thank you.