Hey guys, I'm Alexander and today we'll be talking about One
Week in the Future, Previs Design Futuring for HCI
Research. For decades, science fiction films have depicted
technologies long before their existence in our world. Even
though these futures can sometimes exaggerate concerns
about emerging technologies, they often generate meaningful
discussions amongst their viewers. Companies have borrowed
from these techniques to envision distant product
roadmaps and communicate company values through concept videos
like this. In Apple's 1980s Knowledge Navigator concept, we
see a virtual assistant appear in a tablet-like device years
before the era of Siri and iPads. More recently, Meta has
released similar concept videos, which envision the day-to-day
lives of people living in an interconnected Metaverse world.
Now, examples like these have ultimately led some researchers
and creatives to adopt design futuring in their own practices.
For example, in this one-week design fiction workshop 30
students produced lo-fi concepts of impossible technologies to
spark speculative design discussions. More recently,
these researchers created comic books to explore how fictional
superpowers can provide inspiration for new
visualization systems. Pushing the fidelity of these concepts
even further, this IKEA catalog from the near future depicts
future societal values through alluring marketing images and
product descriptions. While a lot of the time design fictions
are comprised of static imagery, other multimedia formats have
been explored too. In this short form film, themes of algorithmic
prediction errors and data persistence are conveyed as the
main characters interact through an abstracted sheet of glass.
Researchers have also began incorporating higher fidelity
concept videos into their work. In this hi-fi concept with video
effects, a drone projects interactive user interfaces upon
various surfaces. By 2019, this concept was even turned into a
reality, which is kind of amazing. Meanwhile, with the
support of design tools like Blender, content creators on
TikTok and Instagram have also began to showcase short concepts
of their own. When pushed even further, like in this
Kickstarter funded film HYPER-REALITY, intricate video
effects can ultimately captivate audiences as they envision
future worlds with stunning fidelity. As we've seen, across
these design fiction prototyping techniques, there's a spectrum
of formats and concept fidelities. While we found there
are many examples of hi-fi and lo-fi prototypes, examples that
strike a balance between these two ends of the spectrum were
much more limited. To address this gap, we set out to create a
design futuring method that fulfills three main goals.
First, we wanted to maximize the fidelity of the concepts we
created, to encourage world building and highlight
interactions. At the same time, we felt it was important to
minimize the researchers time commitment, to prevent
significant disruptions to their practice. Finally, we ultimately
set out to produce concepts that could facilitate meaningful
discussions and speculative debates about envisioned future
research. To develop our approach, we drew inspiration
from the film production process itself. At the start of
producing an animation, rough storyboards and character
sketches are used to quickly convey and iterate upon high
level concepts. After storyboarding, character models
and major assets are laid out in a 3D scene. This quickly gives a
sense of the sizing and juxtaposition of elements. In
the pre-visualization layout phase, the scene begins to come
to life, as simple textures and the poses of characters are set
into motion. Then for the final shot, mesh details, simulated
fur, and lighting effects are added to create impressive
visuals, that we're accustomed to in feature films. While each
stage of this iterative process provides valuable insights and
discussions, many details about the concept are figured out long
before reaching the final step. For this reason, we decided to
adopt a previs futuring approach. While previs renders
exclude detailed lighting, textures, and character
movements, they go beyond lo-fi sketchy storyboards that can
overlook design details that only arise in a 3D scene. We
also decided to limit our concept videos to a 15-second
social media video format to share with others. And then
finally, our approach assumes a researcher-designer team of two.
Over the course of production, the researcher is encouraged to
share their expertise as the designer materializes these
ideas.
The resulting schedule we followed looked like this. On
the first day of the sprint, the team met to sketch ideas for a
15 second concept video depicting the future of the
researcher's topic of choice. After the meeting, the designer
transformed the concept into storyboards and then presented
them to the researcher on day two. After selecting and
iterating on a storyboard concept, the designer then took
two and a half days to produce a rough previs concept video that
followed the storyboard. On the final day of the sprint, the
concept was presented to the researcher and the team discussed
the overall futuring process while suggesting final changes
to make. After these changes were made, the final render was
created and then shared to social media with a relevant
post title and hashtags. To put our method to the test, I
performed eight design futuring sprints with eight HCI
researchers last summer. Here's a sneak peek of the depictions
we created. Now, if you'd like to view the full concept videos,
you can check them out on Instagram and our TikTok
accounts as well. After the sprints we collaboratively wrote
summaries of our experiences, then clustered these experiences
into several overarching themes. Well, we won't have time to get
into all these themes in our presentation, we'll highlight a
few that we found particularly interesting. Repeatedly, we
found that envisioning our future selves helped generate
ideas that felt more credible and evoked empathy for the
characters and scenes. This took place during our co-designed
senior care concept, when we tried to predict our own
personal retirement preferences based on things we value today.
The availability of appropriate existing 3D models, on sites
like Sketchfab, also heavily influenced the design of the
animated scenes. While sometimes this led to new and exciting
design directions, other times the assets felt a little bit at
a place. In Tim's cooking example, the kitchen appears
somewhat dated when compared to the robotic technologies
depicted in the scene. Throughout the sprints, I also
found that all the researchers connected the future concepts
back to challenges and opportunities in their current
research. For example, when iterating on the heavy haptic
concept with Marcus, we found ourselves discussing the
technologies required to implement such as system and
also thought about who might have access to it. With all
these reflections in mind, we wanted to enable other
researchers and designers to experience the same excitement
of the design futuring sprints that we performed last summer.
And so we created a One Week in the Future Workbook, which is
freely available on GitHub. To develop the workbook, we first
revisited the design notes and assets we collected throughout
the sprints. From these we then identified moments where our
freeform discussions led to debates about future societies,
the exploration of envisioned technologies, and promoted rapid
ideation. These moments were then transformed into structured
canvas activities based loosely around our existing week-long
sprint schedule. Thank you very much for listening to our talk
Please do check out our workbook and our
TikTok page and we hope to see you one week in the future.