Once you have ideated multiple possible concepts of future services that respond to your scenarios, select one or multiple complementary ideas and use the tools below to expand, detail and capture the concept.
People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.
Find this tool in:
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
This tool helps structure and detail a narrative about your chosen scenario, considering the trends, contexts and implications to create plausible scenarios of the future.
Workshop tips How to run the workshop: Use the cards laid out as in the drivers of change categories and include a description of the significance; Be sure you have enough space; Use a timer to keep track of the time; Break the team up into two or three and rotate so a few people can see each group at once ad discuss in the allotted time; Spend about three hours and 15 minutes on each section with a break in between; Set aside a couple of minutes to get familiarised with the section, 8 minutes to review the signals and 5 minutes to discuss and add notes.
People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.
Find this tool in:
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
This tool helps you collect ‘signals’ of the future. A ‘signal’ of the future is a specific innovation, event or disruption that has the potential to grow and expand its influence or it may simply be a clue that a trend is forming.
As you find these signals, detail them as instructed below to build your collaborative future trends toolkit. 1. Start by exploring future signals through online research, articles, books, podcasts, trends reports, and exhibitions; 2. Cluster material such as articles and reports about similar innovations and disruptions together; 3. Starting from the field ‘Describe the signal’, fill out the signal tool by focusing on the relevance of what’s happening. A catchy title and images are key to convey the value of the disruption; 4. After you’ve created a lot of signals try to group them into ‘key influence clusters’ for the first synthesis of your research.
People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.
Find this tool in:
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
Implication analysis (SPEECS) SPEECS is a framework or tool used to analyse and monitor the macro-environmental (external service environment) factors that have an impact on an organisation and its strategy for the future.
SPEECS stands for: S – Societal/Ethical P – Political/Legal E – Environmental E – Economic C – Cultural / Business S – Scientific / Technological
People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.
Find this tool in:
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
This tool helps structure and detail a narrative about your chosen scenario. It frames the scenario as a question about the future and points to potential outcomes
People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.
Find this tool in:
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
The Future Wheel is a method for graphical visualisation of direct and indirect future consequences of a particular change or development. It was invented by Jerome C. Glenn in 1971, when he was a student at the Antioch Graduate School of Education (now Antioch University New England). The Future Wheel is a way to organise thinking and questioning about the future — a kind of structured brainstorming.
People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.
Find this tool in:
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
We synthesise the work of the former two units in order to establish relevant design challenges:
In Unit 1, the team created new contexts of the future by understanding and expanding the collective imagination of the organisation.
In Unit 2, the team explored the needs of future users.
With this information, the team identified critical scenarios with which they could form design challenges by aligning the contexts that were of strategic value to Koa Health with the needs of future users.
The team envisioned scenarios considering different time horizons in the future. At the ‘Planned’ time horizon, there are contexts and conditions which will most likely continue as they are currently. Here, the company is mostly focused on optimising the business. Therefore, the Lab team did not create scenarios for this time horizon.
However, at the Near Future horizon, trends will have reshaped the context and at the Far Future horizon, trends and big events could lead to societal shifts that alter the paradigm.
At these two latter horizons the strategic approach is to manage change, either by creating it, resisting it, adapting to it or leveraging it. We work to expand the collective imagination of what is considered plausible, enabling the organisation to make steps toward opportunity and away from threats. The value of envisioning scenarios for these time horizons is to create the map to plan these ‘directions’.
Overview
After completing the research on extreme users and the company, the lab team went through a synthesis process to create relevant scenarios.
The team envisioned scenarios considering different time horizons in the future. At the ‘Planned’ time horizon, there are contexts and conditions which will most likely continue as they are currently. Here, the company is mostly focussed on optimising the business. Therefore, the Lab team did not create scenarios for this time horizon.
At the ‘Near Future’ horizon, trends will have reshaped the context and at the ‘Far Future’ horizon, trends and big events could lead to societal shifts that alter the paradigm. At these two latter horizons the strategic approach is to manage change by creating it, resisting it, adapting to it or leveraging it. We work to expand the collective imagination of what is considered plausible, enabling the organisation to create paths towards opportunity and away from threats. The value of envisioning scenarios for these time horizons is to create the map to plan these paths.
For both the ‘Near Future’ and the more extreme ‘Far Future’, scenarios are stories that depict possible futures. In the lab team’s definition, they need to include a persona, a context, and the way the persona might act in the context.
With each scenario, they also created a series of design challenges that consider the opportunities for the client to act on those scenarios, supporting the personas’ needs in each distinct context. These scenarios and challenges resulted from combining the research done on the organisation, the context and the users —all of which represent the critical components of the project.
To define the scope of opportunities,, the lab team aimed to take the role of mediator between what the client wanted and what the users in those specific contexts wanted.
01
Expanding the ‘Near Future’ strategy
The work the lab team carried out to understand the company’s business strategy in unit 2 was concluded in this stage by creating scenarios for the Near Future time horizon.
By assessing opportunities in different markets, the team determined that the market that most aligned with the company strategies and resources was the ‘mental wellbeing’ market. Within that space, they decided to focus their attention on students going into university, and in particular, they looked at non-clinical anxiety.
They spotted opportunities within mobile healthcare and university marketplaces. The lab team made this decision based on the client’s current capabilities and the type of impact they could have in that particular sector. They used this research to define scenarios and design challenges that they could use for their project briefs, particularly for the studio projects.
The ‘Near Future’ scenarios were less extreme and less focused on the future than the work for the ‘Far Future’ horizon. Instead, they were aligned more closely with the company strategy. In this way, some of the concepts could be implemented within the client’s platform, demonstrating that by expanding the scope of what is plausible the company could be more innovative.
Activities
Activity 01. Near future persona
The research on the market and the competitive landscape influenced the decision of which audience to prioritise. The lab team realised there was great opportunity with younger generations who are learning to understand and wield their own agency at times of significant change.
Once they specified the target users, they conducted further research.
They narrowed down the scope to:
people aged 16 to 24, struggling to find a proper balance of their work and social life, with their personal aspirations;
and,people transitioning from school to tertiary education and then to work.
The lab team consolidated their findings with the creation of a singular, ‘Near Future’ persona. Then, they analysed the needs and goals of this persona through the lenses of each one of the six societal dimensions (See Fig 1). This process helped the team define the areas of need for each theme, which then represents what they wanted to help the users to achieve.
Near Future persona tool
A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
A persona is generally based on user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behaviour patterns of your target audience.
As mentioned before, the scenarios include a persona, a context and the interaction between them. So, after defining the persona, the lab team conducted further research into the near future for each societal dimension, considering how the persona might relate to each one of the contexts. They collected insights from articles and reports about ‘Gen Z’ and their behaviours. Then, they then synthesised the key elements that greatly influenced the persona. With those in mind, they created short narratives about how the persona acts and used all this to create scenarios.
Near future design challenge
A design scenario builds upon a use scenario: re-examine the key interaction points in the story and think about what technology would help the user in that specific situation. In the beginning, this is a very bottom-up process, starting from the specific before moving to a general design.
For each of the six societal dimensions, the lab team wanted to create a broad design challenge, looking at how they could support the user in the contexts they might face. For each of the scenarios, they brainstormed questions using the formula starting with “how might we.” These questions considered how they could help young people feel more in control over their choices in the different contexts of identity, spirituality, work, body, relationships, and money.
Challenges Overview tool
Once you have created a ‘near future design challenge’ tool for each of the dimensions of change you have addressed, use this information to create this overview. This tool summarises the challenges you are responding to for the near future persona.
Following the work done with the extreme users’ research, the lab team developed extreme scenarios. They called them “extreme” because, in these scenarios, they tried to push the contexts farther into the future, using the research on trends synthesised in the future trends toolkit. At this stage, they focused on exploring future possibilities looking at ways to inspire and provoke the client’s thinking in order to expand the scope of potential futures that were considered ‘plausible’.
The creation of the scenarios for each societal dimension of change started by integrating what they learned from the client, the trends analysis and the research on the extreme users. Followed by envisioning how the contexts and people would interact to demonstrate potential issues and opportunities.
Activities
Activity 01. Future personas
Following the collection of insights from the user interviews, the next step was to synthesise the extreme users’ profiles into future personas. It was mainly a process of combining information from the different extreme users with the insight from their trend analysis.
The lab team decided to create three future personas for each of the six societal dimensions to capture any extremes of people within each dimension or any other distinct traits. For example, with the ‘spirituality’ dimension, simple distinctions could be drawn between atheistic and monotheistic people and people following alternative spiritual practices. The team used the profiles of users they had met for whom these topics were important and extrapolated their profiles into the future.
They created a narrative for each future persona, highlighting what happiness might mean to the persona and their main goals are. The lab team completed 17 future personas — three personas for each of the six societal dimensions, in most cases.
Persona mapping and synthesis
This tool helps you use insights from guerilla research and turn them into the foundation of your Far Future Personas. Once all the insights from the interviews have been reviewed, define some outline tags for each extreme of the dimension based one what you have read. Then, arrange these insights into distinct personas to begin to form the future characters.
The process of building extreme scenarios was based on taking the future personas and combining them with the signals and trends they collected in the future trend cards. This way, they imagined how future contexts would impact the users and how their needs might change as a consequence. They followed a creative process, similar to the exercise the lab team did with the client during the Envision Sprint. For each future persona, they used some of the signals and trends to identify possible events that could affect them.
Then, they imagined how the future persona would behave in that context, how they would interact in the transformed future and what needs or opportunities may emerge.
Extreme Scenario tool
A design scenario builds upon a use scenario: re-examine the key interaction points in the story and think about what technology would help the user in that specific situation. In the beginning, this is a very bottom-up process, starting from the specific before moving to a general design.
This tool helps you bring together and consider the necessary ingredients to create a scenario from which you can later create design challenges. At first use this tool to create multiple options for each persona and then later refine it until you have a scenario that you think will be meaningful.
The lab team’s last activity for the extreme scenarios was to define the design challenges, which would frame their intervention in the next phases.
The design challenges format was a series of questions related to each scenario, starting with the formula “how might we.” To create the questions, they considered the future persona and the extreme scenario, and they brainstormed opportunities to consider in those future contexts. In particular, they focused on the client’s strategy and where they could see themselves creating impact
Extreme Challenges tools
For each scenario, brainstorm a question using the formula starting with “how might we.” These questions would make you consider how you could help young people feel more in control over their choices in the different contexts of identity, spirituality, work, body, relationships, and money.
This tool summarises the scenario and gives you space to respond to it with a reframed design challenge. Complete multiple quick versions of this tool and then refine it, or ideate design challenge questions straight onto your extreme scenarios (using post-its and then complete this once you’ve found the right challenge.
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 2: Conducting the research in the field
Exploring existing product and platform strategies of the organisation, their marketplace, existing users and strategic industrial partners.
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Phase 1: Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 3: Developing scenarios and challenges
Envisioning context and personas of the future
In this unit:
The lab explored in greater depth the existing product and platform strategies of the organisation, understanding their marketplace, existing users and strategic industrial partners.
The main aim was to establish people’s future needs to understand which contexts are relevant to future users and therefore determine what scenarios should be created and used as the basis for design challenges. By going into the field and speaking with real people, the lab team could de-bias the work and develop knowledge that would later enrich the scenarios.
Overview
In the previous unit, the lab team had defined the scope of their exploration and aligned their strategy with the client’s.
They were now ready to start the research into the key societal dimensions of change relating to the topic of health and happiness.
At this point, two streams of work were happening in parallel:
The first was a consultancy project. At the time, the client was interested in developing a platform to incorporate all their projects. The lab carried out work to identify the client’s business and market opportunities. By looking at what the company was doing internally and what opportunities were available in the market, it was possible to understand how to frame this platform
The second was field research. It focused mainly on understanding the future by learning from extreme users.
01
Understanding the company business strategy
In parallel to the extreme users’ research, the lab team concentrated on defining the client’s strategy as a platform and identifying new opportunities in new markets where the client could play a role.
This work was a combination of traditional service design consultancy work and business strategy. The objective was to determine how the client’s products would sit in the context of a broader ecosystem. In particular, the lab team wanted to better understand the role that the client wanted to play in mental health and happiness for young adults going ‘through life transitions’. As the starting point, the lab used the key themes they had prioritised with the client to look for other market opportunities.
Activities
Activity 01. Internal company research
Concerning the platform, the lab team did some further research into the client’s strategy and work. They tried to identify the client’s core capabilities by looking at the technologies they were using, the ethical considerations they were committing to, and their access to scientific knowledge.
The lab team collected all this information, established the main value propositions behind the client’s strategy, and analysed the key mechanisms they were trying to build within their products and services.
The key mechanisms were the core interventions they had developed to encourage behavioural change in users.
Activity 02. External industry overview
To complement their research on the company, the lab team also explored the context, i.e. the other markets.
At the time, the client was part of a larger organisation. For this reason, the lab team conducted a study on the other industries the organisation was exploring.
Using desk research, the lab team conducted a sectoral analysis, collecting information on the potential markets the client could address. For each one, they identified the key players, the jobs to be done, and the opportunities for the platform.
They then assessed these markets and selected the one they identified as the most aligned with the client’s current strategy.
External analysis tools
Sector analysis is an assessment of the economic and financial condition and prospects of a given sector of the economy.
Sector analysis serves to provide an investor with a judgment about how well companies in the sector are expected to perform.
Sector analysis is typically employed by investors who specialise in a particular sector, or who use a top-down or sector rotation approach to investing.In the top-down approach, the most promising sectors are identified first, and then the investor reviews stocks within that sector to determine which ones will ultimately be purchased.
During the Envision Sprint workshop in Unit 1, the concepts that were created were overly similar and seemingly biased toward issues that would not represent the general population. Consequently, they acknowledged that their general vision was biased due to their culture, class, and project involvement. They needed to challenge their thinking more, so they decided to interview people who were already experiencing effects from things similar to the societal change they had predicted. They called these people ‘extreme users’.
During this stage, the objective was to collect insights from these users to get a broader understanding of the implications of trends on specific groups of people and the possible effects in the long term.
Activities
Activity 01. Extreme user mapping
To find these extreme users, the lab team searched for early signs of the effects of the societal change that they had predicted.
They focused their search for these people around the UK and through their contacts. They reached out through different communities and individuals to find people involved in these trends and who were perhaps already influenced by the societal dimensions of change.
The objective was to collect as much information as possible about people’s view on happiness, their needs and issues and to catch glimpses of the future people who might emerge in the context the team were exploring.
The lab team implemented a strategy to plan and map their interviews. They took each one of the societal dimensions of change and defined extremes on both sides. For each extreme, they brainstormed groups of people who fit into those characteristics and prepared a plan to reach those people.
Extreme mapping tool
Extreme users can be described as the people on either end of the spectrum of users of a product or service. The distribution of users of most products or services follows a bell curve, with the mainstream users in the centre and remaining ‘extreme users’ on either side of the peak.
For most of the interviews, the lab team used guerrilla research techniques. The strategy was to conduct interviews with strangers they had met in critical locations identified through the extreme user mapping. They therefore needed ways to conduct quick but meaningful interviews.
They prepared a set of essential questions focused on happiness and what it means for the people they were engaging with. Then, they went out and spoke to people. In addition to the guerrilla interviews, they filled in the gaps with online interviews arranged through other connections.
Research questions tool
To conduct this type of guerilla research, you need to create questions that quickly allow people to express their relationship to broad topics, gradually go into more detail about issues and talk about themselves.
This project was broadly about happiness. For your project, you will need to adapt the questions to your broad topic of interest.
During the interviews, the lab team collected valuable insights and expanded their perspective by talking with extreme users.
The next step was to review all the answers they gathered and arrange them into profiles. They mostly kept them very similar to the real people they interviewed or combined some of them. They created more than 40 profiles, each one included the interviewee’s interpretation of happiness and what they associate happiness with, as well as how they see trends affecting them in the future.
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Worth exploring
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 1: Defining the scope for the Exploration
Exploring the strategy of the organisation to define the scope of potential future contexts.
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 2: Conducting the research in the field
Exploring existing product and platform strategies of the organisation, their marketplace, existing users and strategic industrial partners.
Would you like to know more?
Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.
The elderly are sidelined, but new tools could help connect them in communities and fight for a place in society.
How the scenario could unfold
In this scenario, we consider the potential for emerging trends in technology that may influence relationships
We project that existing trends of social isolation among the elderly may progress further into the future. We suggest that as life expectancy extends and work becomes more global, families may disperse and the elderly may be less supported. In this context, an already vulnerable demographic of society may become even more neglected and witness a deterioration of services that can accommodate their needs. Whether it’s transport, retail or entertainment, elderly people may feel like their communities are shrinking and that they are becoming less able or welcome to engage in society the way they’d like to.
We also propose that as national institutions defile public trust, alternative means of taking action in the world may prosper. We consider that online collectives may become a more powerful means of organising around common interests and specific grievances. These collectives may gain in sophistication in the way they grow and how they amass evidence toward their cause. We may see platforms emerge that use concepts such as clicktivism, crowdfunding and social media mobilisation to advance their methodologies and have impact on the world around them.
We consider the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character who we create based on our research with real people.
What might that mean for Sandra?
For someone like Sandra, whose friendships are reducing and who feels neglected by society, meaningful connections with anybody can bring a little joy. We can explore how services may challenge or meet the needs of people who feel sidelined.
I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.
Jump to:
Scenarios
Enhanced relationships
People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.
Scenarios
Digital Childhoods
Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.
Sandra lives in a three-bedroom house with two cats. Her daughter lives in Finland and her husband passed away fourteen years ago. She spends most of her time sitting and watching documentaries because she has a weak hip but she sometimes takes her scooter to the community centre to see other people and talk about what’s going on around town or share old stories. Although she enjoys going out, she increasingly feels like she’s unwelcome in town – it feels as though she gets in the way. She has been to three funerals for friends in the last 18 months. Her biggest fear is having a serious health problem that will cost more than she can afford.
Happiness for Margaret is knowing that her daughter and grandsons are healthy and happy and she talks to them whenever she gets the chance. She always enjoys seeing her friends to relive fond memories but worries when she has not heard from them for a while.
Her goals
Sandra’s goals are to keep finding meaningful companionship and to be as much a part of her family’s life as possible.
Sandra’s happiness is dependent on her ability to feel connected and relevant to the world through the relationships she has in it.
Explorations in ‘Sidelined and connected communities’
We explore the future by looking for potential points of traction between this scenario of sidelined and connected communities and the needs of someone like Sandra. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or as spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.
Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.
Dignifight is a union style platform for organising activism for the elderly to reshape society so it accommodates them fairly. The platform provides activism tools and events that proactively enable the elderly to fight for their right to be respected in society.
Microaggression recording wearables track and monitor the lived experience of age discrimination to build evidence and their media machine communicates their fight with headlines such as ‘46% age pay gap for the elderly’.
The platform also offers partnerships with Re-training Schools, Universities and recruitment agencies designed specifically for the elderly to help them come out of retirement if they want to.
Team: The Lab
Jump to:
Propositions
Qualitime
Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.
YOLT is an events organising algorithm that connects hosts, venues and people together to create amazing communities of diverse individuals.
It learns people’s preferences, and forms safe events around people’s common interests and provides activities and conversation starters that are appropriate to each group in order to connect people together across all demographics.
Once connected people grow their online network of friends so they can see what people are doing and evolve their own social groups.
Team: The Lab
Jump to:
Propositions
Yolt
Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.
Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.
In this set of explorations, we are asked to consider two ways in which disconnected and sidelined communities can reclaim their own power and connection to one another and to society. One that uses a union style strategy to bring together activists and organise in highly sophisticated ways and the second strategy that uses technology to match individuals with groups and facilitate new communities.
The first area of exploration uses sophisticated algorithms to get to know individuals that are isolated and then using that information it matches people to each other and initiates events and conversations to help transition people from isolated, anxious and perhaps vulnerable positions into more resilient communities. From this exploration, we can ask what it may mean to have communities facilitated by algorithms. Might it bring together new types of people that would otherwise not have connected? could that promote tolerance and acceptance or division? If all communities have their own identities – do algorithmically created groups and friends have a unique style? Do these communities need to be maintained by AI as well as initiated by them and if so does that mean the quality of the relationships is lesser?
While these questions are based on the full unfolding of the concept, and while the concept still represents a potentially exciting way to reduce isolation, the explorations take the discussion around technologically enabled relationships up to a ‘community’ level where we can begin to explore how algorithms could intervene in fruitful or damaging ways having macro side-effects.
The second area of exploration revolves around the concept of activism and proposes a union style model that mobilises disempowered communities to act in organised ways to reach their goal. Protest may be a traditional means of making change but it’s organisation may become increasingly sophisticated. The internet could bring people together around common causes, wearables could help to portray people’s plight, social media can carry their message and their direct actions can be designed and organised to the greatest effect by platforms dealing solely in fighting injustice. What this represents is a potential emergence of services that build on clicktivism, crowdfunding and social media mobilisation by adopting new technologies and coordinating in new ways that bring more voice to people’s needs.
This particular exploration also raises topics around what an age inclusive society might mean and what impact societal relationships may have on people’s happiness. The inclusion of emotion sensing wearables as a weapon in the activists arsenal to document microaggressions not only translates the damage caused by inequality to the broader public but it also demonstrates the impact of transient, micro-relationships on people’s happiness. We may be able to quantify the true impact of the interactions we have as we pass on the streets and in the shops.
These explorations discuss our relationships at the community or societal level and introduce discussions around the role of technology in initiating community and potentially highlighting the impact of unhealthy societal tensions.
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Related to ‘Sidelined and connected communities’
Proposition Types
Relationship Facilitators
Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.
Propositions
Yolt
Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.
Would you like to know more?
Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.
People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and have the types of relationships they like in a more transient, but online world. New arrangements of relationships may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI, ushering in even more radical concepts of relationships.
How the scenario could unfold
In this scenario, we illustrate conditions resulting from a selection of possible trends. We can foresee that there may be an increased sense of independent freedom of identity, allowing people to more fluidly define who they are and how they live, outside of more societally constructed norms such as gender, nationality, race, profession or sexuality. This could lead to a freedom to choose how you want to live as well as a freedom to explore and redefine yourself constantly. Within this context, we may see connections between each other alter, as more options for ways of being become available.
We see individuals living and working remotely, enabling them to continually move from place to place. This transience could be supported further by increasingly high fidelity online environments for socialising and working, which may use a plethora of virtual reality techniques to augment or generate digital worlds. This may mean relationships will fluctuate between physical and virtual spaces and be long or short term.
Alongside this emerging fluidity, we consider the integration of highly sophisticated, emotional AI into our lives in ways that will mean we can understand and communicate ourselves in totally new ways. This emotional understanding may influence the way that technology initiates and supports different types of relationships between people.
We consider the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character we created based on our research with real people.
What might that mean for Lu?
For Lu, relationships are everything and can take any form. We explore how services may evolve around people’s new relational needs.
I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.
Jump to:
Scenarios
Enhanced relationships
People may expand their freedoms to live how they like and subsequently have the types of relationships they like in a more transient but online world. New arrangements of relationship may be initiated, supported, or managed by AI and usher in even more radical concepts of relationships.
Scenarios
Digital Childhoods
Children may spend more of their time in online environments that can transform their educational and creative experiences but equally have increased capacity to captivate and shape their world view in potentially problematic ways.
Lu travels around the world staying in hostels, hotels and co-living/working spaces cataloguing her adventures in her digital notebook. She lives for thrills, and believes that if something scares her, she needs to try it at least once. She opens up relationship apps whenever she gets to a new city, so she can get companionship and connection in different forms. When she’s alone, she logs into her online virtual worlds to socialise. Initiating relationships might be easy, but they can also lead to a lot of hassle ,so she tries to make the most of the connections she has.
Her happiness is shaped by the experiences she has through the people she meets, so she manages her relationships carefully across online and offline worlds.
Her goal
Lu’s goals are to constantly lean into her fear of change repeating things as little as possible, and while she wants to maintain her independence, she still wants to continue and make the most of her relationships.
For her, relationships are varied and complex, so the effort required has to balance with the value they gain from them.
Explorations in ‘Enhanced Relationships’
In this scenario, we explore the future by producing concepts of services that respond to the needs of someone like Lu. Sometimes these future concepts articulate provocative or even implausible caricatures of services, but provocation and implausibility often stimulate the dialogue that is needed for the emergence of new strategies.
What beneficial elements of these services could be fostered? What is already happening in some way?
What harm may these services do?
What might prevent services such as these proliferating?
What cultures may develop around a landscape of services such as this?
Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.
Relover is an implant designed to alter your vision, so you can see different faces mapped onto the people around you. This digital implant connects your visual system with our processors and is designed to augment and alter your view, allowing you to select how you want people to look. Choose people you know, adapt and tweak people’s actual appearance or opt for celebrities you’ve always wanted to meet.
Team: The Lab
Jump to:
Propositions
Eros
Eros is essentially a romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app.
Relate divides your relationship needs into multiple categories, so they can be fulfilled by different people that are matched perfectly and arranged for you.
Relate learns your preferences and through its advanced matching techniques, initiates and arranges all of your ‘romantic’ relationships categories to reduce the complexity of modern connections.
Relate integrates with all user’s empathy devices, so there is always a shared understanding of each other’s expectations and desires.
Team: The Lab
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Service Visions:
Yolt
YOLT is an events organising algorithm that connects hosts, venues and people together to create amazing communities of diverse individuals.
Eros leverages artificial intelligence to enhance human-human romantic relationships for young adults already in them. This romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app, aims to help young adults learn more about themselves and their partners, so they are better able to build intimate, committed and passionate relationships in the present and future.
Team: The Lab
Jump to:
Service Visions
Child share
Child share is a matching system based on the needs, experiences and characters of parent types in order to create the perfect ongoing parental network for your child.
Emerging topics
Within these explorations, a multitude of topics emerge about how our relationships might be affected by such sophisticated technological methods of understanding ourselves and connecting to one another.
Firstly, we consider that if AI is able to understand the emotional states of individuals within a relationship to a more advanced level than it could without the technology, then this paves the way for new dynamics between people. We can ask whether a relationship that forms around such technology is natural or not? Whether it could extend unhealthy relationships that would otherwise have ended? Are there parts of our relationships that should purely be left unaided? Might these tools alter what we see in our relationships, and our perceptions of what is valuable and subsequently alter what a normal relationship is?
With concepts such as ‘Relate’, we see the extension of dating apps into complex relationship managers that revel in the emergence of atypical relationship structures and potentially divide relationships into services that fulfil different areas of people’s emotional and physical needs. We may see people having relationships that suit them specifically for different things like support, encouragement, sex or adventure. These relationships have an additional dimension added when we consider the possibility of virtual online relationships that could be enhanced through advanced virtual reality experiences.
If we consider an additional extension of virtual relationships, we can foresee a blurring between the existing sex industry and the emerging ‘relationship’ industry. If a person can digitally manifest across the world, then they can create experiences with multiple people at once, and therefore the relationship can be a commodity to whatever level of customised emotional or physical intimacy is called for. Consider a sex worker whose body, conversational style, vocabulary, and previous interactions can be collected and modelled in a virtual world. While this projection is not fully convincing of a world where artificial relationships can be realistically intimate and meaningful, one only needs to looks at the impacts of the current sex industry to argue that realism is not essential in order to impact how people form relationships.
Share:
Related to ‘Sidelined and connected communities’
Proposition Types
Relationship Facilitators
Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.
Propositions
Yolt
Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.
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I feel good knowing my daughter’s family is ok… every time the phone rings I wish it was him. Sometimes I hear the phone ringing even when it’s not.
