A panel organized for South By Southwest 2024 with Avi Bar-Zeev (XR Guild and Reality Prime), and Andreea Ion Cojocaru. Our intent was to share our experiences, practices, and ways of working when developing and prototyping new ideas. We also intended to share one particular approach — the Work Kit of Design Fiction / Mad Libs — ideation mechanic through audience participation.

The presentations by each of us went well on their own. I was anxious about how the audience participation component might go. I was pleasantly surprised at how deeply engaged and enthusiastic the audience was to participate live with the experience. Each 'outcome' of a configuration of prompts results in a sentence, possibly initially nonsense-sounding, that we then collectively (from the dias, as well as people contributing from the audience) imagined as a real-world product or service. The point was to show how effective it is to think outside of one's comfort zone to allow something that feels nonsensical or plain old nonsence, and let it find its context until you feel that '..actually, this gives me an idea..' moment.