Hi Stuart –
This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. In experience design efforts are often made to get into the heads of the audience/customers/users to understand what they bring to the table - their mental models, their histories, their expectations, as well as their context – usually through some sort of research activity. So we aren’t just designing for ourselves, but rather for someone else through empathy.
So my question to you is this: How do futurists get “into the heads” of the hypothetical participants in a scenario? And similarly, when someone is immersed in a reality prototype, is any effort made to condition them into a particular frame of mind beforehand? Or is it better to drop them into the possible future unprepared, so the jarring experience is more powerful?
Looking forward to more discussion on this topic…
Natron
Natron, good questions.
Futures practitioners vary wildly, so I won't pretend that one response covers the field. We can however talk about the distinctive approach to workshops and experiential interventions (FoundFutures projects described at this blog) that have emerged from the Manoa School.
On the question of how we get "into the heads" of the participants or clients; I don't know if that's possible, and even if it were, I couldn't be sure that it's desirable. If we go back to the point Shedroff makes in his interview about design as a co-creative process -- and let me add that pursuing preferred futures is probably the ultimate collaborative "design" process -- for that purpose there's no need to get to "know" a client inside out. (Indeed, to me here's something very scary about a supposition that to really design well, you need total information awareness.) On the contrary, I think the reason for engaging in an ongoing process of futuring "out loud", or what you've called reality prototyping, is to partner with them in an exploration process that may be hard or perhaps impossible for them to undertake alone.
So let me reframe the challenge a little, around that qualifier: yes, there does need to be some deep digging that goes on, into the sorts of things you described -- mental models, histories, expectations. However, what matters is not us "getting in" to examine those in the role of experts, but rather, helping those things to find their way out. And, seen from that angle, we can add two points: (a) the client is in a much better position than we are to do the digging, and (b) it may be fine for those things to come out in an embodied form -- embodied in a better decision, in greater confidence, in an innovative change of direction, in a next-generation prototype that's closer to the mark. All that valuable information we're talking about needs to be somewhere in the mix, but getting into the head of someone isn't the job of the futurist (or designer) per se, but of the scenario, prototype, or experience that the futurist / designer offers up. The goal as I see it is more to trigger a reflexive process which empowers them to make wiser decisions, than to lay them out passively on the couch for inspection or treatment.
Of course, futurist and designer roles, while similar, aren't identical. So when you speak of designing *for* someone, with empathy, that makes a lot more sense when you're talking about a website or a car (design) than it would when you're talking about society at large (futures). My strong preference for a collaborative ethos comes from the latter context, which is bound to differ from more constrained exercises.
Anyway, I've just passed the mind-mining buck along from the futurist to the scenario or experience she produces. To answer your question in this setting -- how does a scenario or design get what's needed out of the head/s of the client -- I guess the answer is twofold.
Offering alternative futures gives people a basis for appreciating the different ways that their product, industry, government, or world could unfold over the timeline in question. Let's call that divergence.
To engage in exploration of alternatives on an ongoing basis rather than just once lets you learn and progress (what works and doesn't; what's scary, thrilling or mundane; etc). Call that iteration.
Structurally, this is pretty much the same way biological evolution works: mutation (divergence) and descent through generations (iteration). The difference is that evolution does it blindly, where design and futures are guided by norms or ideals, so doesn't have to iterate millions of times to achieve a good fit. An important part of the purpose of futuring is, I think, to discover what those ideals are.
Divergence and iteration however don't tell you much about how to make an effective experience, one that elicits the kind of good stuff you're interested in. That's no small part of what this blog is about, so it's hard for me to distil that into a short answer.
The hallmark of a good scenario comes for us by balancing provocative absurdity with compelling reasoning. Dator's second law of the future is that "Any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous". Something that seems outlandish at first blush but which has an underlying logic that begins to shine through as you spend time with it: that's a useful future.
As for how to prime people, when we do a futures workshop where written scenarios are distributed, we have a spiel that asks people (at first, anyway) to hold off on criticising the assumptions made in their scenario: "Whatever you may initially feel about the future into which you have been so suddenly placed, please suspend your disbelief! You have no more control over your being in this future than you had over when and where you were born. This is your life. Love it, because you can't leave it. For the next few minutes, make the best of the future you find yourself in, just as you obviously do in the present."
After spending some time dealing with conditions "in-scenario", there is an opportunity to ask questions from a critical standpoint outside of it.
However, it's partly because not every learning style is readily able to engage such thought experimentation that we have turned to more thoroughly immersive interventions, which invite, by setting an in-world example, an in-world response, which you can always switch out of later.
Whether (and if so, how) to drop people into the scenario without warning is a tricky judgment call. Since you're not aiming to confuse anyone permanently, you need to consider what cues are available and how those will be (mis)read. A little cognitive dissonance that people can resolve for themselves goes a long way to engaging them. They may on the other hand get alienated by too challenging a setup, although this is no less true of (very non-immersive) written scenarios. So, echoing Shedroff again, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. What's key is to try to get people willing to "play", which is a lot harder in some contexts than others.
