What if Scenarios
Co-design
What if scenarios / cards are used to help the co-creation process by allowing participants the opportunity to iterate on your fictional designs. This is helpful because, the absurdity helps encourage divergent thinking among the participants.
These sessions are helpful for complicated opportunity spaces.
“Dealing with people’s dreams, hopes, and aspirations as well as
with their fears and concerns is usually tightly linked with practical struggles to influence the world in ways that comply with these imaginings. Instead of leaving the follow-up question “what if things really were different?” for designers, future casters, or innovation strategists to pursue, I suggest that the exploration of how imaginative horizons can be given articulate but tentative form could be a welcome challenge for an anthropology that takes the imagination
seriously.”
— Joachim Halse, Design Anthropology Theory and Practice Pg 191
Procedure
Materials
Sticky notes
Markers and pens
Pre-made scenario cards
Front of Card
Motivated sketch showing how you think the design would work.
Back of Card
Title of Design
“Explanatory quote”
What if statement
In person
Explain that scenarios are fictional and incomplete
Encourage them to let their imagination run wild and write down first thing that comes to their mind
Join them in creation, feed into their creative energy
Jump from idea to idea when each grows stale
Analysis
Immediately after each session write down reflection
Evaluate sticky notes for common phrases and ideas
Highlight ideas you did not think of and ones that open new lines of thinking
Use this to inform ideation sessions in opportunity space
Use Case
I began my co-creation session by introducing myself and explaining to my participant that today we would be doing a design exercise about waste management. I presented them with my first idea, “Naked Groceries” which suggested doing away with single use plastics in grocery stores.
The participant loved the ideas because they loved to shop at Aldis, but hated having to buy everything in packaging. They suggested that we could make it a law, such as the no plastic bags law that has been passed successfully in other places.
This went on with several new ideas such as; bulk only stores, “expired” food donations, renewable supply chain for “organic” products.
Strengths
These design ideas helped me understand the priorities of my participant and helped me understand the ideal future that they see.
Weaknesses
By creating the cards in the first place you are limiting the scope of starting points. There are also many people who are simply too polite to engage in the iterative design process since it does require either familiarity or a certain level of extroversion.
