A Design Fiction Workshop to Invigorate Our Ability To Imagine Plausible & Habitable Futures In Which GenAI Is Part of the Material Cultural Fabric Of Everyday Life
Earlier this week I helped facilitate a two day workshop and summit, developed in collaboration with Tech Concept Lab, one of my development partners in Sweden. I’m enjoying putting together these ‘collabs’ — working together with organizations and teams that previously would have been in some kind of competitive mode. We each have strengths, networks of relationships, sensibilities (‘brands’) and character attributes in front of our audiences that can become more powerful, more engaging, and generally more fun when we work together and work in service to each other.
These times are kinetic, chaotic, and full of dynamics that indicate change, if nothing more precise. It’s more than important — indeed it is existentially vital — that we constantly prototype and investigate possible futures as a matter of course. Think of these kinds of ‘workshops’ or ‘summits’ as training exercises, preparing ourselves for tomorrow, with no hard-and-fast expectation about tomorrow. This isn’t training for war, although some may prefer the metaphor.
This is more like the hygiene of exercise as physical fitness: the jogging enthusiast who takes to the street before dawn to do a routine 5 kilometer run.
Why do they do this?
Because it clears the mind of the obstacles of cobwebs of confusion and conflict; releases the endorphins that cause a sense of wellness and preparedness. Joggers jog. This is what they do. They know — as do we all by now — that jogging is good for the body and mind.
Jogging — or running if you prefer — is a hundred billion dollar business because it is.
What is this same principle as ‘jogging’ but as an organizational exercise — or workshop, or summit if you prefer — around the topic of AI?
What is this same principle as ‘jogging’ but meant to keep the organization ‘fit’ to the task of anticipating the unexpected, unanticipated, or even just the anticipated evolution of the marketplace?
This is what we were after as an initial step with this two-day Design Fiction Sprint, hosted by Tech Concept Lab (TCL) at the Hyper Island facility in Karlskrona Sweden.
We brought together 40 creative thinkers from Sweden’s innovation ecosystem, alongside experts from companies like Ericsson, Istudios Visuals, Softhouse, and Hyper Island.
The goal of this sprint?
To stop debating AI and start imagining into the kind of futures we want to inhabit by experiencing a world where AI has become as normal, ordinary and everyday as jogging or wheels on lugage.
This wasn’t about dreaming up far-fetched sci-fi scenarios nor wallowing in the despair of an apocolypse; it was about creating tangible prototypes that represent possible/plausible near futures. We explored how AI could reshape everything from public services to academia, industry, and the creative economy — and these explorations were in the form of tangible prototypes, not white papers, policy statements, or endless debates on the technology, its implications, or our own fears.
Facilitation Note:
Generally speaking, there seems to be a tendency to describe the artifacts ‘found’ in the context of the General Seminar component of the workshop. That is, there is a preference (or inclination) towards exposition rather than revealing a speechless object (or drawing, or representation). So presentations end up more as descriptions — like explaining a UX flow and reasoning as to why rather than wondering ‘what is this thing?’, the way an archeologist might when they find an unknown artifact. The note to myself for future workshops: do not let groups present; rather have them show something and let others discern/unpack/discover/imagine what it is.
