Through Michael Bishop I had the opportunity to speak at Vizient’s Architecture Speaker Series about the transformative potential of Imagination within the realm of innovation. The attendees ranged across the spectrum of the kinds of people you might find in a SaaS company who’s focus is on managing operational performance within a healthcare industry services provider. That said, I believe any realm of human endeavor, whether commercial or not, will only benefit from finding the right balance between efficiency and performance and exploratory activities that may not always make sense to operate from the perspective of business-oriented efficiency measures. To that end, my discussion of the topic of bringing creativity back into the organization involved sharing insights and experiences from the work I’ve done over the last decades, particularly around the concept of ‘Design Fiction,’ the cornerstone approach and methodology that I’ve been advocating for as a means to fostering creativity and charting possible paths towards a future guided by creativity, invention, and innovation — my way of igniting a new renaissance.

What is Design Fiction?

Well, Design Fiction operates as a process to expand our imaginative capacities by creating ‘artifacts from possible near futures.’ This approach serves as a methodology that not only assesses current trends but also synthesizes and imagines new possibilities. I find inspiration often in the unlikeliest of places—like the world of science fiction. For me, the Star Trek communicator was more than just a tool in a show; it was a window into how imagination can shape real-world innovations, much like the impact it had on early mobile phone designs.

During my talk, I went through some of my projects where Design Fiction played a pivotal role. My collaboration with IKEA was one of those. Together, we explored the potential futures of domestic life by using their iconic catalogs as a kind of blueprint for inserting possible implications of certain trends in domestic life, technology, hopes and fears about the future in the form of IKEA or IKEA-principled products and services. This project, among others, exemplifies how turning research insights into tangible and engaging representations can significantly impact the way we think about potential products and services.

The Design Fiction method involves several key steps: assessing what’s current, synthesizing information to find patterns, imagining expansive futures, and ultimately creating artifacts that make these futures tangible. This approach — a rough framework that has some flexibility but also guides the creation of artifacts — allows organizations to engage with creativity and innovation in a deeply practical and existential manner. The outcomes are the implications of change; the artifacts that one might find in the changed, evolved world of the ‘next’ or ‘near future’. These artifacts can activate more resolved prototyping — or inspire innovation or evolution of existing offerings, or even

Questions ranged from how we could use these methods in software development, especially within the healthcare sector, to ways of spawning creativity at the onset of projects. We explored ideas like creating Quick Start Guides or FAQs, not just as administrative content but as imaginative documents that challenge our conventional thinking.