Resource: Methods
Phase 1: Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Framing of the research
In this unit:
We defined the scope of potential future contexts for both Koa Health and the lab team. To focus the scope on the correct areas, it was important to first explore Koa Health’s strategy to understand their areas of knowledge and interest.
With that information, the lab team explored the future through trend analysis and created tools to collaborate with the organisation, conjuring concepts of potential future contexts.
The spectrum of resulting contexts and insight into the organisational imagination enabled the lab to define a framework that organised the ways in which societal change may affect people in the future
Process overview
To set the scope of their exploration of the future, the lab team’s first step was to learn more about the organisation.
- The team collected insights on the way the client works, their projects, and their values and identified their core value proposition.
- The lab team understood where the client’s focus was and what dimensions they were considering and using in their research.
With this knowledge, the lab team organised a workshop tailored around those dimensions and conducted some creative exercises with the client to uncover the signals of potential future trends and areas they found exciting and more valuable. The workshop helped the lab understand where to direct the next research phase.
Expanding on those areas of interest for the client, the lab team started an analysis of trends that they thought will have a relevant impact on the future of health and happiness. They used a variety of tools from different disciplines, including speculative design.
The lab team identified a series of drivers for change. A driver of change is a trend, an event or any factor that instigates a distinct change in a particular context or the world in general.
To agree which drivers of change to prioritise, the lab team had to share them with the client. It was too much content for a report or a presentation so they had to use different approaches.
- The lab team decided to create a deck of cards, which could be used as a collaborative, interactive toolkit.. Each card represented a driver of change.
- The lab team presented the toolkit, ‘Collaborative Future Trends Cards’ to the client in a workshop. The cards became a powerful tool for both the lab and for the client who quickly became familiar with the drivers of change. After the workshop, the client kept the cards in the office, continually finding value and inspiration in them.
Scenario
Religious Malleability
Understanding the client
In this stage, the lab team collected insights about the client’s value proposition in order to understand the client’s way of working and align the lab team’s process to it. The research was valuable because t it organised and visualised the company strategy, which allowed the lab team to establish the scope of their work and helped the client reflect both on their current approach and on how to communicate it best.
Activities
Activity 1: Insights on the company’s way of working
The first activity for the lab team was to review all the materials the client shared with them and conduct in-depth interviews with the members of the core team. They mapped everything the client was working on, their principles, how they positioned themselves in the competitive environment and their business model. In particular strategy, for the business model, they identified strategic market segments, along with key partners and activities. Additionally, they reviewed the work done during the collaboration between the client and the Royal College of Art in the previous years, which involved the master’s students.
By analysing and synthesising all the insights collected, the lab team ended up with a detailed understanding of the client’s . They also discovered that the core value proposition for the client was using artificial intelligence to support healthy interactions, in all realms of mental health – clinical, non-clinical and wellbeing, with a particular focus on happiness.
Activity 2: Research strands definition
During the research on the company’s strategy, the lab team started to map out the research strands or areas of knowledge that characterised the projects the client had been working on. They identified five main strands of research that were influencing the client’s work: science, business, technology, design and social. Using these research strands, the lab team came up with a framework, which showed how the client took an interdisciplinary approach, starting from the different dimensions of knowledge and then converging into the creation of MVPs (minimum viable products) used as prototypes to test their assumptions.
This framework became useful for the lab team to understand how to expand the research and stay aligned with the client, but this turned out to be valuable also for the client itself, as they started using it to communicate their process to various audiences.
Activity 3: Future signals exploration workshop
After the research, the next step was to prepare a workshop to be held with the client. In this workshop, the lab team could understand the client’s interests and their existing, collective imagination of what trends may emerge in the future. The lab team first identified some of the most thought-provoking indicators of potential future trends. These indicators are called ‘signals’ and they represent clues about what the future might hold. The team used these as a source of inspiration during the workshop. They then organised a “Signal Safari”, asking the participants to discuss ideas, concepts and technologies they felt will have a significant impact in the future of their field.
The exercise resulted in a fascinating collection of future signals and reflections, which they asked the client to expand through the use of the future wheel. The future wheel is a tool frequently used in speculative design, to explore the direct and indirect consequences of a particular signal or trend.
Future wheel
The futures wheel is a method for graphical visualisation of direct and indirect future consequences of a particular change or development. It was invented by Jerome C. Glenn in 1971, when he was a student at the Antioch Graduate School of Education (now Antioch University New England).
The Futures Wheel is a way of organising thinking and questioning about the future – a kind of structured brainstorming.
Jerome C. Glenn (1994) The Futures Wheel
Finally, the last exercise of the workshop was for the participants to generate a series of what-if questions based on the signals explored. Those questions helped the lab team understand what the client’s core team considered the most critical aspects and perspectives about the future.
Vision of the future tool
This tool helps structure and detail a narrative about your chosen scenario. It frames the scenario as a question about the future and points to potential outcomes.
Download tool
Check out:
Scenario
Self Expansion
Creating the framework for future thinking
Once the lab team got an understanding of the client’s strategy and what they were looking for, the next step was to do extensive research on future trends. They aimed to cover all the client’s main areas of interest across their strands of research: Science, technology, business, design and social.
The workshop with the client to explore future signals was crucial in helping the lab team frame the research and understand where to direct the next exploration.
During this stage, they applied tools and techniques from other disciplines, in particular speculative design. The result went beyond a simple trend report; instead, it made the lab team empathise and analyse each possible future scenario. The output was a framework to analyse and communicate the research, which took the form of a collaborative future trend toolkit.
Activities
Activity 1: Future trends analysis
The lab team’s first activity for creating the framework was to research and analyse future signals, trends and societal shifts.
The difference between the three is mainly about scale:
- A signal of the future is a specific innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow and expand its influence or a clue that a trend is forming.
- A trend is a direction of change over time, connected with one or more signals.
- A societal shift happens at a much larger, potentially global scale and includes multiple trends to indicate a significant societal change.
To identify these signals and trends, the lab team looked at the future from various perspectives, using the client’s research strands as a starting point. They looked at what changes may happen across a range of perspectives from scientific and technological to business and societal perspectives. This process was mainly done through desk research, exploring future signals in articles, books, podcasts, trends reports, exhibitions and online.
They grouped them into what they called “key influences,” which helped them do the first synthesis of their research. As this work was not done to define how the future will be, but to inspire, they refrained from specifically defining trends at this stage (although later trends are described in a hypothetical manner). They then extrapolated potential implications from these influences using the future wheel, as they did with the client during the first workshop.
The lab team also looked at the implications of these influencers through the lenses of a custom built framework called SPEECS. The aim was to understand and expand their thinking on these trends’ implications and ensure that a broad scope of implications had been considered. With SPEECS, they covered the Societal/Ethical, Political/Legal, Environmental, Economic, Cultural/Business and Scientific/Technological aspects.
The lab team then generated some what-if questions using the key influence clusters and their analysis, which provided a broad representation of the project’s available scope.
Implication analysis (SPEECS)
SPEECS is a framework or tool used to analyse and monitor the macro-environmental (external service environment) factors that have an impact on an organisation and its strategy for the future.
Download tool
SPEECS stands for:
- S – Societal/Ethical
- P – Political/Legal
- E – Environmental
- E – Economic
- C – Cultural / Business
- S – Scientific / Technological
Collaborative Future Trends Toolkit
This tool helps you collect ‘signals’ of the future. A ‘signal’ of the future is a specific innovation, event or disruption that has the potential to grow and expand its influence or it may simply be a clue that a trend is forming. As you find these signals, detail them as instructed below to build your collaborative future trends toolkit.
- Start by exploring future signals through online research, articles, books, podcasts, trends reports, and exhibitions;
- Cluster material such as articles and reports about similar innovations and disruptions together;
- Starting from the field ‘Describe the signal’, fill out the signal tool by focusing on the relevance of what’s happening. A catchy title and images are key to convey the value of the disruption;
- After you’ve created a lot of signals try to group them into ‘key influence clusters’ for the first synthesis of your research.
Jump to:
Scenario
Pragmatic Collectives
Activity 2: Collaborative future trends toolkit
For the second activity, the lab team enriched, defined and mapped their key influences and then classified them either as related to the context or to the individual. This distinction is fundamental as it had a significant influence on the next stages. The Influences were distinguished between these two categories based on what they impacted directly.
The lab team based the framework on the notion that the two main dimensions where the key influences act are on the individual, and on the context they exist within.
These key influences were used to introduce and frame each set of signals and trends cards.
- One card for each signal or trend, (including descriptions and references).
- One ‘Key Influence’ card explaining the broader implications of each collection of signals or trends
- One card explaining how the key influences affect either the context or the individual.
This deck of cards became one of the most powerful tools and a useful reference throughout the entire project.
Exploring the future landscape with the client
After the creation of the cards, the lab team was ready to re-engage with the client. This stage’s objective was to clearly prioritise themes to focus on in the field research. The lab team went back to the client with the collaborative future trends cards to do a second workshop for future exploration.
Bringing a toolkit instead of a report of signals provided high value for the client, because the core team could interact with it, expand it, and use it as a reference tool. The client and the lab team expanded on the signals to better understand the future landscape and started imagining possible concepts that could emerge in those contexts.
Activities
Activity 1: Signal Safari
The lab team dedicated the first part of the workshop to explore the signals with the client using the collaborative future trends cards. This session was called “Signal Safari”. The lab team asked the participants from the client’s team to split into groups, and review a cluster of signals using the deck, discuss their thoughts and raise questions.
The multidisciplinary groups included designers, technologists, and scientists who gave their input and shared their perspectives.
Once the groups were familiar with the signals, they shared their reflections with the other groups about the topics that interested them the most. By using the deck of cards, the lab team managed to get everyone in the team to understand most of the signals they researched in under 2 hours, which was critical for the second part of the workshop.
Scenario creation toolkit
This tool helps structure and detail a narrative about your chosen scenario, considering the trends, contexts and implications to create plausible scenarios of the future.
Download
Activity 2: Envision Sprint
The second part of the workshop was an “Envision Sprint”. Participants brainstormed ideas and shared them with the rest of the team. The lab team held two brainstorming sessions, one dedicated to creating scenarios and one to ideate concepts. These sessions helped them understand the way the client thinks and what they were expecting from the project. So, the envision sprint was a means to an end: the lab team was not interested in the outputs but more in the reasoning process and the themes that emerged.
The structure of the scenarios that the client imagined included a timeframe of when that future would happen, what context emerged from the signals, how they imagined happiness would be different in that context, and the potential consequences and impact of their projection.
Using these scenarios, the lab team then asked the participants to imagine new services that could emerge. Using templates they encouraged each group to brainstorm a future concept, give it a name, explain what it does, it’s key elements and visualise it through a sketch and a storyboard.
The most exciting part of the workshop was when they asked the team to review their concepts and think about their implications for the client’s objectives. This moment was an excellent opportunity for the lab team to observe the way the client prioritises ideas.
Future concept tool
Once you have ideated multiple possible concepts of future services that respond to your scenarios, select one or multiple complementary ideas and use the tools below to expand, detail and capture the concept.
Future tweet
Write a tweet acting either as the service owner or a key stakeholder. Putting yourself in the shoes of that person, try to describe the service or an outcome of the service.
Download
Activity 3: Prioritisation of societal dimensions related to health and happiness
Following the workshop with the client, the lab team started to analyse the themes that emerged during the discussion of the signals and brainstorming sessions.
They mapped them out concerning the main topic of health and happiness and identified six key trends to prioritise.
They then reframed them as societal dimensions of change, which in this case related to health and happiness. These were: identity, spirituality, work, body, relationships, and money. With this prioritisation, they could guide their research to the client’s areas of interest, making sure to stay aligned with their strategy.
Would you like to know more?
Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.
Phase 1: Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Framing of the research
An overview of our design approach
The efforts of the previous phase centred on assessing the user, and value hypothesis of the propositions through testing with the market.
This work also provided the space for the organisation to evaluate the implications of the propositions and engage in new ethical discussions about the role of the organisation.
All these factors combined with a careful strategic assessment, resulted in the appropriate selection of engaging and relevant concepts to take forward to this final phase.
The task of this phase is to convert the concepts into live services that can operate as ‘minimum viable’ versions of their future potential, (meaning a service that functions just enough to meaningfully trial the value proposition).
In doing so, the lab connects real functioning services to real people in the market, assessing in an uncontrolled environment how users would engage, What they would find valuable and most critically for this final stage — what impact the services could have.
This stage, therefore, shows whether the value propositions can be converted into live services that are not just engaging, but also effective in delivering agency, happiness or health outcomes.
The theory
However, there was less complexity in terms of managing what is provocative or futuristic. At this point, the concepts to be tested and developed were already backcast to a tangible and unprovocative state for most users.
This final phase uses similar practical methodologies as the previous one. This innovation process is also about the testing and development of concepts to rapidly deliver them and it is largely tied to the lean development methodology.
Therefore, the methodology applied here was to build, measure and learn.
- Formulate hypotheses or assumptions based on the previous stage and build MVPs as experiments that could challenge these assumptions.
- Measure the outcomes of the experiment, collecting data and observations.
- Synthesise learnings from the collected data to build knowledge, inform the overall concept and reformulate hypotheses to be tested in another cycle.
As with the previous stages the assumptions to be tested were of varying kinds.The three main categories were:
- the user hypothesis (the target user segment appropriate);
- the problem hypothesis (the problem identified is worth addressing); and,
- the value hypothesis (the solution for tackling the problem is engaging and effective).
These were all tested to a degree in the previous round, but here the user hypothesis and problem hypothesis can be more robustly challenged with the existence of functional prototypes and the value hypothesis can be more legitimately divided and assessed in terms of its effectiveness or impact and how engaging it is for users. In other words, this stage not only asks ‘do the users want it?’, but also, ‘Does it work for them?’. This level of exploration can only be conducted once you are able to prototype a user experience that can be used, rather than when it’s simply a proposition of a service.
The process
In this phase, the two units refer to two different organisational structures or vehicles for the development of live services. Unit 1 refers to work done in-house, and Unit 2 refers to work done through Innovation RCA (The RCA’s startup incubation centre). Broadly, both processes have the same objectives of going from developed value propositions into live services, but their initial steps vary.
For the in-house unit of work, the initial stages are about aligning the project with the clients organisational strategy and reframing the value proposition and hypotheses to get the most valuable placement of the service and the most meaningful research outcomes.
For the Innovation RCA unit, the initial stages are about the mechanics of forming a legal entity, setting up shareholder agreements and managing intellectual property etc.
Once these initial stages are worked through, both organisational options operate in a similar process of creating MVPs or prototypes that enable them to experiment with the market in some way, so as to prove or disprove their hypotheses. Based on these experiments they can interpret results, decipher new learnings and proceed in an increasingly less risky direction.
This process eventually leads to larger investments in the development of a product that can operate as an autonomous service in a live marketplace. The results of which enable the client and both types of organisational structure to robustly understand the value and the impact of the services they are developing, and can thus move forward decisively.
Phase 4: Deliver Live Services
Choose a unit to explore
Unit 1: Developing Services In-House
Unit 2: Incubating in InnovationRCA
Would you like to know more?
Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.
Phase 1: Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Framing of the research
An overview of our design approach
Stuart Candy’s Future Cone heavily influenced the approach of the “Envision Future Scenarios” phase.
Candy’s Future cone is a theoretical model that encourages the organisation of potential future outcomes into three categories of likelihood:
- What is probable
- What is plausible
- What is possible (but unlikely)
The model also prompts you to consider the outcomes that are preferable in relation to their likelihood, i.e. what is plausible is likely to be more innovative than what is probable and is therefore preferred.
The lab adapted the model to also depict three key timeframes in the future (based on McKinsey’s time horizons), which matched the strategy of Koa Health. Instead of depicting what was preferable out of a range of future outcomes, the lab depicted potential future contexts that were of strategic value to the organisation.
The lab’s role with Alpha was to expand the organisation’s collective imagination of what is plausible in order to create a larger scope of desirable futures, which they later hoped to make more probable through experimentation and development.
Therefore, the lab team mapped contexts of the future that were plausible and enriched those contexts with personas of future people in order to form full scenarios, which could later allow them to design in response to future needs of users.
The theory
To enact this design approach the lab explored the organisation’s imagination of future contexts by looking for future trends connected to their different areas of research.
Then, the lab identified contexts which were of strategic significance to the organisation based on what was plausible and compatible for the organisation. This enabled the team to identify a framework that organises potential future change into six societal dimensions.
These dimensions of change were then used as a framework to help the team focus user research on ‘extreme’ users that might be highly affected by each specific dimension of societal change. The combination of the needs of these future users with the scenarios of strategic importance, helped the lab select critical scenarios that were aligned with the company and relevant to future people.
The process
At the start of the project, before focusing on one or more specific directions, the lab team had two distinct areas to understand:
- First, the future context, which was understood by looking at signals of the future and trends that will shape it.
- Second, the organisation, which was understood by exploring the client’s strategy in depth.
The work in this phase explores these two areas, oscillating between the context (world and society of the future) and the organisation (the client), sharing what was created and understood in one area, with stakeholders in the other.
The output of this phase was a series of scenarios around the topic of health and happiness, based on both the lab team’s understanding of the organisational strategy and their learnings about the future world.
A scenario is a story that illustrates a possible future. In this project, scenarios include a context (which is a combination of trends that define the parameters of the scenario), a persona (which is an abstract representation of a user), and a short narrative about how the persona interacts with the context.
The phase is composed of three units:
Unit 1 is about defining the scope of exploration.
The lab team dove into two streams of research in parallel:
- Understanding the client’s strategy
- Exploring future signals and trends.
This resulted in trend tools that help to understand and expand the organisational imagination of potential future contexts and create a framework to organise our thinking on the different dimensions of societal change.
Unit 2 is about understanding the needs of future users to gain human insight.
This could later complement and define the strategic criteria to be used to prioritise the areas worth exploring further.
Unit 3 is about crafting scenarios.
The lab team then turned these scenarios into design challenges. Some were more aligned with the immediate strategy and others were set far in the future.
A design challenge is a question that usually starts with the formula “how might we”, and summarises a specific problem to address.
The scenario planning methodology had deeply influenced all the lab team’s work on designing scenarios (see frameworks section). The idea to take on this approach originated from an observation made by Dr Rafael Ramirez (Director of the Oxford Scenarios Programme and Professor of Practice). He thinks that when scenario planners create scenarios of the future, they tend to mistakenly apply existing mindsets to interpret and understand the meaning of future contexts, rather than trying to anticipate how a future mindset might interpret and understand future contexts. Essentially, he means that using the tools of the present to understand the future could likely create misleading interpretations.
The lab team realised they could not design the scenarios without first defining what the future contexts will look like and the needs of the individuals who will populate them. This last point was probably the most difficult to work on, as people tend to be generally biased by their current ways of seeing the world.
A key challenge was to go beyond the biases and understand that not only the contexts will look very different in the future, but also the people who will inhabit those contexts will have completely different needs.
Envision future scenarios
Discover how the lab team mapped plausible future contexts and developed personas of the future in order to create full scenarios.
Would you like to know more?
Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.
Welcome to the methods bank
Understand and unpack your problems to create and implement strategic service propositions
What is the methods bank?
Here you will find innovation methods grouped in four phases. The aim of these methods is to mobilise talent and explore the boundaries of what can be done to create and implement viable, feasible and desirable service propositions that are aligned with the strategy.
Design-led innovation phases
This design-led innovation project proposes a novel service innovation process for moonshot design, validation and acceleration using an action-research through design approach.
Envision Future Scenarios
Explore Service Visions
Design Value propositions
Deliver Live Services
1. Envision Future Scenarios
Explore the units within phase one of the innovation process.
ENVISION SCENARIOS
UNIT 1: DEFINING THE SCOPE FOR THE EXPLORATION
2. Explore Service Visions
Explore the units within phase two of the innovation process.
Explore Service Visions
UNIT 1: Conducting lab explorations
3. Design Value Propositions
Explore the units within phase three of the innovation process.
