Resources
Explore our resources
Here you'll have access to all the Xploratory resources.
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.
Scenarios
Work instability
Automation and climate change will cause huge turmoil in economies, people may be working online, based on their chosen field or “gig”, and move in search of better economic environments. Reputation will become ever more vital as people have to quickly and consistently re-establish themselves and we will see more online platforms supporting offline gig workers’ skills.
Proposition Types
Self-Editors
Optimising and Editing yourself and your life to meet your personal criteria for success.
Tools
Prototyping Tools
Why is this tool useful? Landing page mockup: This tool is an example of a website landing page layout. Using images, fake logos, and text. Use this (or an adapted version of this) to explain your concept and plan your landing page.
Tools
Evaluation of KPIs
Why is this tool useful? This tool will help you and your project partner agree on how to establish the success of your MVP evaluating success metrics related to its engagement, the collection of data and functionalities of the technology employed.
Tools
Future Persona Tool
Why is this tool useful? A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. A persona is generally based on this user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behaviour patterns of your target audience.
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.
Tools
Challenge Overview Tool
This tool summarises the challenges you are responding to for the near future persona.
Tools
Competitor Analysis Tools (Competitor Analysis)
Use this template to analyse and breakdown key attributes of your competitors, including values, visual aspects and features.
Tools
Design Challenge Table
You can use this table to organise all the challenges in order to facilitate conversation and voting.
Dimensions of change
Body
Your relationship with your body may be pressurised but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.
Tools
Market Landscape
Why is this tool useful? This tool is used to have an overview of the market landscape by comparing the positioning of your potential competitors. This helps you to identify gaps in your market segment that aren’t currently filled so you can differentiate your service from the others. To compare your competitors, try different combinations … Continued
Tools
Design Challenge Analysis
Use this tool to explore and discuss the value of each design challenge.
Tools
Experiment Blueprint
Why is this tool useful? This tool helps you delineate key actions and touchpoints of each stage in your experiment, so that you can foresee what infrastructure is required to deliver the experiment smoothly. Depending on the complexity of your experiment you may choose to develop a more nuanced version of this map detailing precise … Continued
Explore Service Visions
Unit 2: Conducting Studio Explorations
Developing concepts of ‘far future’ services that responded to the scenarios and design challenges created in the previous work package.
Tools
Evaluation Of Shortlisted Projects
Why is this tool useful? This tool provides a detailed understanding of the client’s response to each service concept. Use this tool or a digital surveying tool. Once you have all the responses, you can compare quantitative results and discuss the selection.
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.
Propositions
Kinderpendent
Kinderpendent helps you understand how balanced your child’s online exposure is to challenging social topics and perspectives and manages that exposure through intelligent balancing and censorship tools and offers advice and support for parents and children while navigating big topics.
Scenarios
Identity Fluidity
Identity could grow more fluid as people gain more freedom to pursue the lifestyles of their choosing outside normative assumptions of race, nationality, sexuality, gender, age and more. More nuanced characteristics are supported by social media niches alongside AI that may raise self awareness to help you define what works for you.
Tools
Service Scoresheets (Services Perception Scoresheets)
Why is this tool useful? This tool is designed to help your research participants assess the service you have designed and give you comprehensive quantitative and qualitative feedback to catch anything you may have missed throughout the interview.
Envision Future Scenarios
Unit 3: Developing scenarios and challenges
Envisioning scenarios considering different time horizons in the future and the needs of future users.
Proposition Types
Agency Enhancers
Developing a deeper AI driven understanding of yourself to influence your decisions and optimise for your happiness and prosperity.
Tools
Positioning
Why is this tool useful? This tool should help you define and express the positioning of your brand and service so that the service is distinguished from competitors and conveys the correct values to the user. Use one set of positioning tools for each positioning option. After you define the positioning, use this tool to … Continued
Live Services
Quirk
Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.
Tools
Design Objectives
Why is this tool useful? This tool helps you identify the main problems the users would experience in their current journey and structure objectives that could overcome these issues in your new service proposition.
Phase
Phase 4: Deliver Live Services
Converting the concepts into live services that can operate as ‘minimum viable’ versions of their future potential.
Phase
Phase 3: Design Value Propositions
Propositions are tangible future concepts to help the client expand their collective imagination of plausible future services and to discuss the potential opportunities and implications these future services could bring to our society and the organisation.
Propositions
Mobible
Mobible is a chatbot that helps connect your faith with you, your life and your community based on church teachings and knowledge decoded from the scripture.
Scenarios
Pragmatic collectives
Distrust in the ability of governments and large organisations to offer genuine solutions to pressing issues may result in the adoption of individual action organised around new models of ethical priorities and infrastructures.
Phase
Phase 1: Envision Future Scenarios
The lab team mapped plausible future context & developed future personas to create full scenarios.
Tools
Concept Creation Tool
Why is this tool useful? This tool will help you tell the story of the experience of the user when they engage with the service, considering how the user starts with a problem and how they are influenced by the service.
Propositions
Greencoin
Greencoin tracks your environmental impact. When you have a positive impact you earn Greencoin currency which can be spent on sustainable products.
Scenarios
Altered Parenthood
Advances in medicine could result in increased life expectancy and the extension of sociological or biological phases of life, such as reproductivity. New ways of creating children and alternative types of familial structure may remodel important concepts of identity relating to families, in particular, what it means to be a ‘parent’.
Propositions
Eros
Eros is essentially a romantic relationship coach and assistant, wrapped into the convenience of an app.
Tools
Use Cases
Why is this tool useful? This tool is used to have an overview of the market landscape by comparing the positioning of your potential competitors. This helps you to identify gaps in your market segment that aren’t currently filled, so you can differentiate your service from the others. To compare your competitors, try different combinations … Continued
Dimensions of change
Money
The meaning of money may change as it is tied to our emotions, our communities and our responsibilities in a world that may blame capitalism for inequality and climate change.
Propositions
Pulse
Pulse extends your gaming life outside of the digital space in order to incentivise healthy activities and prevent gaming from becoming detrimental.
Tools
Know Your Participants (Significant people in your life)
Why is this tool useful? This tool is designed to help your research participants describe the people in their life in order to give you a picture of who they are.
Tools
Prototyping Plan Tool
Why is this tool useful? This tool helps you plan how to test your service concepts which reduces the risk of pursuing new concepts that may not work. To start, identify your most concerning assumption about the concept as a starting point and then follow the map. Each experiment leads to new insights, decisions and … Continued
Propositions
Pyro
Pyro has the best access to the latest and safest physical and mental augmentations on the market. As soon as these products and services are on the market, you can get them from us.
Tools
Service Proposition Overview
Why is this tool useful? This tool is used to convey all the relevant information about the concept and the learnings from your testing,so that you and the client can evaluate and prioritise actions Discover all Xploratory’s Tools in the Resources Page
Proposition Types
Need Commoditisers
The commoditisation of our needs and values to incentivise behaviour change. The advanced digitisation of our lives could result in the quantifying and subsequent unionisation of different aspects of behaviour and the values that drive them.
Propositions
Ethos
Ethos learns, tracks and guides people’s behaviours to help them live more in line with their values and beliefs.
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.
Tools
User Landscape
Why is this tool useful? This tool is used to create an overview of users and define the attributes that may influence the users relationship with the problem. Select an influencing attribute for the horizontal axis and place users horizontally in the map relating to high or low extremes of that attribute. Then, select another … Continued
Tools
Extreme Challenges Tools
This tool summarises scenarios and gives you space to respond to it with a reframed design challenge.
Propositions
Spark
Spark is a service that helps you discover your financial personality to align it with your consumption and help you make better financial decisions and achieve financial health and wellbeing.
Live Services
Edit
Edit is an app that helps you fill your daily routine with more positive actions than smoking. It’s not about quitting cold turkey or feeling like a patient. It’s just about trying new things and seeing if they work for you and your lifestyle.
Tools
Future Tweet
Why is this tool useful? Write a tweet acting either as the service owner or a key stakeholder. Putting yourself in the shoes of that person, try to describe the service or an outcome of the service.
Dimensions of change
Relationships
Technology expands the scope and meaning of what relationships are while disrupting some existing dynamics. Relationships may be initiated, supported, curated and managed through AI.
Deliver Live Services
Unit 1: Developing services in-house.
Transforming the value propositions of the phase into live services to test their commercialisation in the market and their strategic value beyond monetisation.
Tools
Near Future Design Challenge
Why is this tool useful? 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 … Continued
Proposition Types
Ethics Providers
Platforms as facilitators and brokers of value judgements. It’s possible that in the future we could foresee an advancement of AI with the ability to codify and model the highly complex ethical parameters of everyday life.
Tools
Scenario Creation Toolkit
Why is this tool useful? 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 … Continued
Tools
Retention Monitoring And Improvement
Why is this tool useful? This tool is used to help you monitor and refine your attraction and retention efforts. As you try different promotion, onboarding and retention techniques in the early stages of launching the service, collect data about distinct periods where different approaches have been employed and use this tool to determine what … Continued
Tools
Researh Question Tool
Why is this tool useful? 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 … Continued
Proposition Types
Relationship Facilitators
Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.
Tools
Online Advert Testing
Why is this tool useful? This tool helps you minimise the cost of your main advertising campaign when you launch the service by running preliminary advert testing. Design different adverts that test variations in your advertising strategy. Create variables in things like the problem you present, the framing of the solution, the users you target, … Continued
Tools
Extreme Mapping Tool
Use this tool to map extreme users. They can be described as the people on either end of the spectrum of users of a product or service.
Tools
Concept Testing Strategy
Why is this tool useful? Use this tool to set up your social media adverts in a way that will reveal as much as possible about the desirability of your concepts and allow you to compare them. This tool helps you to distinguish which variables you will focus on.
Scenarios
Connected localism
Decentralised infrastructures may be adopted by ‘smart’ localised communities to provide an escape route for those who feel that larger, more traditional infrastructures always work to entrap the public.
Tools
Future Concept Tool
Why is this tool useful? 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.
Scenarios
Sidelined and connected communities
The elderly are sidelined but new tools could help connect them in communities and fight for a place in society.
Tools
Experiment Planing
Why is this tool useful? This tool is designed to help you distinguish the key participants in your experiment and operationally plan its set up, including any variation of process for each participant type.
Propositions
Mymes
Mymes uses an understanding of people’s behaviour to create simulations of their future to help them make decisions and it distills different sides of their character to help them explore who they are.
Tools
Know Your Participants (About your time)
Why is this tool useful? This tool is designed to help your research participants describe elements of their life in order to give you a picture of who they are.
Tools
Future Wheel
Why is this tool useful? 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 … Continued
Deliver Live Services
Unit 2: Incubating at InnovationRCA
Turning a service concept into a functioning service that can exist in a live marketplace in a way that it can de-risk investment by incubating at InnovationRCA, the Royal College of Art’s centre for entrepreneurship and commercialisation.
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.
Scenarios
Smart ageing
People’s life expectancy may seem to perpetually extend without people really knowing when death may come, living with an ageing body will be a longer part of life and therefore illness is even more problematic. People may dedicate more of their life to extending their lives.
Explorations Section
Explorations
Provocative future service concepts brought about by interactions between future people and their future contexts.
Dimensions of change
Spirituality
Values and beliefs could be strained by a mixture of people’s environment and self-discovery.
Scenarios
Self expansion
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.
Phase
Phase 2: Explore Service Visions
Excursions into future scenarios. Expanding the collective imagination of what services could emerge in various contexts by creating concepts of future services.
Tools
SPEECS
Why is this tool useful? 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 – … Continued
Dimensions of change
Work
Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.
Scenarios
Religious malleability
Religious structures could feel unstable in their ethical foundations as they shift in reaction to threats from the World. It may be difficult to find a community to put your faith into because it could become difficult to distinguish between religious practice and an organisational/commercial service.
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.
Tools
Extreme Scenario Tool
Why is this tool useful? 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 … Continued
Design Value Propositions
Unit 1: Creating Lab Propositions
Bringing the concepts back from a more futuristic setting to a believable present scope so that users were able to interact with the prototypes and the team could understand the value of each concept.
Tools
Vision Of The Future
Why is this tool useful? 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
Tools
Qual & Quant review (Quanlitative experiment results)
This tool is used to summarise the qualitative engagement of a single participant during the trial after your interviews.
Scenarios
Emotional money
AI could advance to levels that would allow sophisticated understanding of people’s emotions. If that information is coupled with financial behaviours or organisational objectives it could transform how value is assigned to our services and our experiences.
Tools
Prototyping Plan Tools (Social Media advertising template)
Why is this tool useful? This tool helps you to design your adverts. Use one of these for each advert variant. Please note there are restrictions in the way you set ads for certain things (eg. financial services).
Scenarios
Wealth legacy
In a world facing more and more turmoil and inequality, the super-rich may be held to account for their impact on the world and may be increasingly expected to use their wealth to support people who are disempowered or in peril.
Labs
Xploratory
We deliver breakthrough innovations to address some of the greatest challenges in the health sector worldwide.
Scenarios
Scarce authenticity
Technologies that can alter core beliefs could be used to design lifestyles and characteristics to optimise wellbeing. Wellbeing could be co-opted to suit a corrupt agenda.
Tools
User Story
Why is this tool useful? This tool helps you visualise the concept and figure out possible faults and improvements on the user experience. Feel free to outline different users and develop related stories and multiple paths in which the user could interact with the service. This will help you disclose more divergent objectives and refine … Continued
Scenarios
Blended Work-Home-Travel
The increased demand for workforces with flexible capacities alter the role of education as work and skills based training become intertwined. At the same time, geographic flexibility allows people to work remotely and we may see shifts in the relationship between people’s work-life, home-life and travel.
Tools
Qual & Quant review (Quantitative experiment results)
Why is this tool useful? This tool is used to give an overview of the quantitative results from the experiment
Tools
Near Future Persona Tool
Why is this tool useful? 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.
Explore Service Visions
Unit 1: Conducting Lab Explorations
Developing concepts of ‘far future’ services that responded to the scenarios and design challenges created in the previous work package.
Scenarios
Structured Social Judgement
Constant social media judgement could lead to extended states of anxiety potentially making people attempt to perfect their outward appearance. Data could be collected against people’s will and without their knowledge and lead to further control over people’s behaviour.
Tools
Sector Analysis
Why is this tool useful? 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 … Continued
Scenarios
Personal control
Devices quantify and measure all aspects of the people’s lives and body amplifying obsessive behaviours. People’s personal identity becomes more based on an idealised virtual version of oneself rather than your existing reality.
Tools
Persona Mapping And Synthesis
Why is this tool useful? 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 … Continued
Tools
Competitor analysis tools (Competitor analysis overview)
Why is this tool useful? Use this template to compare key elements of competitors in your marketplace against your concept and against each other, and then categorise them.
Tools
Design Challenge
Why is this tool useful? This tool helps you define the design challenge for the brief. Create one for each dimension of change.
Tools
Interview template
Why is this tool useful? This tool can used as a guideline to inform your interview structure.
Dimensions of change
Identity
Self Identity is challenged, open for exploration and the building of character.
Propositions
EQLS
EQLS is a digital space where people can speak to AI characters about anything they’d like. They help people learn about themselves and they help life get easier.
Methods section
Methods
Explore Xploratory’s four innovation methods that enable you to understand and unpack your problems from a strategic and interdisciplinary point of view.
Design Value Propositions
Unit 2: Creating Studio Propositions
Bringing the concepts back from a more futuristic setting to a believable present scope so that users were able to interact with the prototypes and the team could understand the value of each concept.
Propositions
Edit
Edit is a lifestyle service that helps you edit things in and out of your life through enriched tracking and mini-experiments.
Tools
Prototyping Plan Tools (Landing Page Mockups)
Why is this tool useful? This tool is an example of a website landing page layout. Using images, fake logos, and text. Use this (or an adapted version of this) to explain your concept and plan your landing page.
Live Services
Hold
Hold is an app that gives people the personal space to let out whatever is on their mind and relax knowing that it is stored safely. It helps people give structure to their internal dialogue making self reflection become more effective.
Tools
Service Scoresheets (Services Scoresheets)
Why is this tool useful? This tool is designed to help your research participants assess the service you have designed in quantitative form so that you could potentially compare these results across service concepts. In some questions focus on happiness, but adapt if this does not fit your task.
Tools
Backcasting Tool
This tool identifies and reframes elements of your future concepts that make it difficult to meaningfully test your hypotheses.
