No need to wait for the future

In a recent futuring workshop, I guided Product Owners, UX Designers, Visual Designers, and senior management through futurising user personas to then innovate products to address their potential future needs.

Afterwards, we discussed how they might use these tools in their jobs today.

While these tools are used more by futurists and strategists in the diverge stage to help shape the design plan, they are adaptable and can be applied in multiple ways. The more these tools are discovered, the more they can be experimented with, and the more future-thinking can be applied to projects today.

To help foster this discovery and experimentation, here are insights from designers just discovering these tools and some of my own experimentation with their application.

Futures Wheel

The Futures Wheel is used to brainstorm the impacts of an idea, change, or decision to explore the effects of combinations of those impacts.

The original Futures Wheel was invented by futurist Jerome C. Glenn in 1971 to explore the consequences of change. It is now also used as a decision-making and idea-exploring tool.

The Futures Wheel is often used in the early stages of design to help shape the design plan. However, it can be used at any time a design decision is made that might impact multiple scenarios.

Here’s one workshop participant’s thoughts on using the Futures Wheel in their job today:

“Really understanding user impacts and how (like in the real world) they relate to one another” —

How to use the Futures Wheel:

1. Write your Challenge (idea/decision/change) in the centre.
2. Imagine this Challenge actually occurs, and identify (brainstorm or research) possible direct consequences. These can be positive, negative, or neutral. Write them in the first ring around the Challenge in the centre.
3. Identify indirect consequences generated by the direct consequences. Use the connecting lines to help you think of what indirect results the combined effects of two direct results might generate. These lines are just a guide, feel free to ignore/remove as needed.
4. Extend into new rings of indirect results as many times as desired. Feel free to go into third or more levels of consequences.
5. Analyze for next steps—consider how to improve or manage the negative impacts, enhance and leverage the positive, and remove or energise the neutral.

Future Headlines

Future Headlines are fictional news headlines created to envision future impacts of a decision, change, or idea.

Often used in Forecasting and Service Design, Headlines can also be used by Product Owners and UX Designers wanting to use the sense of public reaction that headlines create to more effectively communicate the impacts of ideas to stakeholders.

Frog Design uses its headline method to help businesses imagine a future 5–15 years ahead and the products and services that might be needed. A variation of Headlines is Cover Story, an imagination game for businesses to brainstorm their ultimate future state by designing a magazine cover announcing their success.

A workshop participant’s thoughts on using headlines:

“In my strategy role …stretching our ideas for 1+, 3+, 5+ year roadmap” — Workshop participant (Product Owner)

How to create future news headlines:

1. Define the future time frame
2. Research potential future influences/risks to your product and sort them into groups (e.g. business, user, society, environment)
3. Ideate impacts of risks on each group (use the Futures Wheel)
4. Cluster into ‘trends’ and write a summary sentence of each
5. Choose the most interesting/relative trend summary from each group and rewrite them into provocative headlines
6. If needed, repeat for all themes
7. Use the headlines as prompts to innovate product features and/or strategy and to gain buy-in for their consideration

Future Persona

Future Personas are useful for exploring changing needs and problems of current personas so that you can design for their best future experiences.

Personas are fictitious representations of target user segments based on factual research. They often include demographics, needs, goals, skills, attitudes, frustrations, and general background to provide the context of their relationship with a product or service. They are used to ensure a product or service satisfies the needs of various user segments.

A workshop participant’s thoughts on using future personas:

“Would be useful when thinking about new features, etc.” — Workshop participant

How to create a future version of your current personas

1. Pick a timeframe for the future persona.
2. Fill in the details of an existing persona—their name and a photo to represent them.
3. In the left column, enter the current mth/yr. Under needs, list up to 5 key needs they have today.
4. In the right column, enter the future mth/yr.
5. Use the Futures Wheel to brainstorm how future technology and/or social changes impact your current persona key needs, organise/affinity map your ideas into themes, and note these in the future (right) column of needs.
6. On the future cone triangle in the middle, draw an arrowed line to show how each need progresses in the future—draw an arrow upward if the need improves, down if it worsens, or straight if it stays the same.
7. On the ‘overall progress’ cone at the bottom, draw one arrowed line that summarises the future persona’s progress (positive, negative, or neutral, depending on which was most common for the needs above)
8. Use your Future Personas to help guide feature innovating, prioritising, and road mapping.

Have fun, experiment, and feel free to share in the comments any other ideas on how you might use these tools.

Download “Futuring tools for today”.

Damien Lutz is a UX Designer, researcher and mentor, and the creator of the Future Scouting design game and book. Follow Damien here on Medium.

More from Damien:

The Futures Pixel — a tool for mindful design

Keep design decisions centred on values, challenging biases and assumptions, and future-minded. Read this article.

A holistic design toolkit for life-centred design

Experimental tools to include the environment and non-users in design-thinking and speculative design. Read this article.

Tools to invent better futures

Experimental tools to align speculative and futures design with core values and life-centred thinking. Read this article.