Findability features FoundFutures

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Peter "Ambient Findability" Morville for his blog findability.org, about working at the intersection of design and alternative futures. (I recently rediscovered and responded to a post he wrote over a year ago, in which he expressed an interest in the interweaving of user experience strategy and futures studies.) We talked quite a bit about the ongoing collaborative project FoundFutures which fellow futurist Jake Dunagan and I have been running since 02006, with the help of a stable -- if stable is the word for these people -- of brilliant designers.

The resulting post appeared today.

I'm grateful to Peter for initiating a really interesting conversation.

As regular readers of t.s.f. are already well aware, there's an orientation in these pages toward how design and futures thinking are being (and can continue to be) woven together. One of the biggest challenges in synthetic, generalist, or transdisciplinary inquiry lies in semantic mismatches, so that people discussing essentially the same phenomena using different terms may never become aware of each other's research or ideas. Traditionally this has been a boon to the academy, in that people could become well-known, admired experts in their respective fields without ever having to take into account the challenges of other folks using different terminology in the next building over. Increased connectivity of people and subjects are rapidly breaking down those walls (notably, via tag-based taxonomies which allow you to have your semantic cake and eat it, so things can easily belong in and be accessed via multiple, previously siloed, categories).

So these disciplinary and linguistic divisions both impede and enable new discoveries: each is a different perspective, a different way of perceiving or knowing the subject.

Swings and roundabouts, my friends. Swings and roundabouts.

Consequently each discussion around design and futures with someone whose experience brings them to the intersection from a different angle opens up new (that is, new to me) insights, search terms, and avenues of inquiry. Peter's principal areas of expertise are information architecture and user experience. Several of the links he included in his post open up frontiers I look forward to exploring:

> Victor Lombardi's thinking on "tangible futures"
> The EU initiative and report Design for Future Needs
> Nathan Shedroff and Davis Masten's project Postcards from the Future

Coincidentally, I'd scheduled a meeting with Nathan (an experience design expert) in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and we enjoyed a highly interesting exchange of ideas, many of which took the form of trading isomorphic insights arrived at via slightly different avenues. Thus, the beginning of another promising thread in this effort.

The Great Design-Futures Conversation continues. All are welcome.

Behold: a disturbing hole!

Or: Principles for designing future artifacts, post the first.

One of our jobs at HRCFS drew to a close recently, with the delivery of a number of "prototype futures" -- visual mockups of the possible social context for prototype technologies, as opposed to images of the hypothetical gadgets themselves.

I want to start a new thread here at t.s.f. which will reflect, with practical ends in mind, on how we create artifacts from the future, and why. For confidentiality reasons I can't say much about the aforementioned project, but the lessons and ideas that our team has been able to derive from it, among other experiential scenario design projects over the last couple of years, seem well worth sharing for those interested in scenario design.

Some ideas may be a little cryptic at first, but I expect to be able to illustrate and extend each point with examples as we go along.

The first thing to note is what seemed a throwaway line from Ambient Findability author Peter Morville in a comment to a July 02007 post at his blog, findability.org, that has wormed its way into our design lexicon for futures artifacts:

"[S]ometimes, it's better to invite contributions with a disturbing hole than to silence conversation with a pacifying whole."

Morville was referring to a framework for "user experience strategy" in which he had left one cell of a honeycomb-shaped diagram unlabelled, seeking feedback from his readership as to what term it should contain.

The post (and diagram) could in principle have been about anything, and his remark would still have made sense as a statement of the value in deliberately leaving gaps when soliciting feedback, i.e., active engagement by an audience. But in a pleasing bit of symmetry, it turns out that he was talking about linking user experience strategy with futures studies, which is precisely the point of ensuring the (temporarily) "disturbing hole" in a future artifact. It's a design characteristic of an effective user experience of a future scenario.

This came to mind after a discussion during the week with some futurist colleagues about the relative merits of priming an audience by explaining the content or intent of an experiential scenario, versus leaving these to be resolved by audience members themselves (or revealed only after exposure to the experience).

I suspect that the moment of puzzlement which the viewer must bridge for herself is, pedagogically speaking, priceless. You can read initial puzzlement transforming into comprehension on the faces of people when they encounter a well-designed future artifact for the first time.

A disturbing hole is a worthy goal.

But too large a hole is a cognitive drain. Just as bad as a pacifying whole, which is basically soporific, because insufficiently challenging. A self-explanatory, but not simplistically self-evident, proposition is best. Actually, it's a lot like humour: a skilled comedian may craft the delivery of a gag, yet spontaneous laughter (arising from connections the audience makes for itself) is the index of success.

Hmm. The value of comedy in futures has now cropped up in three consecutive posts. Funny.

[Continue to the next post on designing future artifacts...]