Imagining the Future of Travel with Speculative Design: Collaboration between Somia CX and tiket.com | by Michelle Natalie | Somia CX Thoughts | Medium

This post is a part of collaboration between Somia Customer Experience and tiket.com Research Team

tiket research team and Somia CX are exploring the future together 🚀

Have you ever got stuck on a creative block as a researcher or designer? When all of the ideas and solutions you propose feel bland, and there’s nothing new or innovative about it.

Most days, our role demands us to be a good problem solver. The kind of designer or researcher that takes customer’s need, resource limitations, business objective, feasibility (the list goes on) into account to ensure that the proposed solutions solely answer the business objective. Well there’s nothing wrong with that, but we get so accustomed to it and slowly forget the random, creative side we once were. And just like that, “innovation is reserved for someone that is brave enough to ask.”

In Somia CX, we encourage our consultants to experiment with different kinds of frameworks and play around with wild ideas. One method that we’re currently exploring is speculative design.

What is speculative design?

Speculative design is “a practice on how to use design as a tool to imagine possible futures, question the status quo and discuss what kind of future we want and don’t want to live in.” The term was first coined by British designers Anthony Dunn and Fiona Raby in the 90s. The method is currently embraced by businesses to kickstart innovation. Ford’s City of Tomorrow explores how the company could still be relevant in a society where pedestrians are taking a more central role rather than cars. Visa and Pepsi have been hiring science fiction writers to help them predict the future. Even Meta has their own dedicated group for this called Pathfinders.

Last June, we hosted an online speculative design workshop and asked the Tiket.com research team to join the fun and imagine the future of travel together. Here’s the step-by-step process of how we ran the online speculative workshop!

Overall Workshop Design

The goal of the workshop is to brainstorm artifacts from the future and discuss future issues or opportunities in the traveling industry. To design this workshop, Somia CX drew inspiration from journals we’ve read about future-oriented design and other speculative design workshops run by different organizations. We only had limited time to run the workshop (2.5 hours), so we incorporated different tools to make it easier for participants to speculate about the future.

Tools needed:

👨🏻‍💻 Zoom or any other video call platforms with breakout room feature → to be used to divide the participants into different groups.

🖍 Miro / Mural / FigJam (any collaboration tool)

Phase 1: Identify current problem

Since we focused on reimagining the future of travel, we had different teams to discuss challenges and needs of different kinds of traveling activity: honeymoon travel, group outing, medical tourism, event-specific trip such as Coachella concert, etc.

Card prompts for different traveling activity

We asked the team to pick one type of travel and do assumption dumption. We also listed down following questions to be discussed:

What kind of people do this trip?
What do they usually do during the trip?
What is their constraint or pain point?
What is their need?

💬 Why is it needed?

To get everyone to reflect and align their perspectives on the current state of traveling before we reimagine the future of travel.

Assumption dumption done by the participants

Then, we hopped to the future! 🚀

Phase 2: World Building

Firstly, participants need to build a future world scenario using the prompts we’ve prepared. To help the team reimagine the future, we combined two tools to facilitate conversation about the future world: The Things from The Future by Situation Lab and The Trend Cards by We Design Thinking.

1. Pick 1 arc card to outline the type of the future and how far away it is from today

There are four types of Arc:Growth — a future in which “progress” has continued.Collapse — a future in which society as we know it has come apart.Discipline — a future in which order is deliberately coordinated or imposed.Transformation — a future in which a profound historical evolution has occurred.

Afterwards, the team can pick other prompts to help future visioning, such as rising tech trends and policy cards.

e.g one team took Growth (a decade) from the arc card + gaming drives innovation (tech trend). The card prompts are used as a foundation for future visioning discussion: What would the future look like when gaming takes the center stage of innovation?

Prompts to facilitate the future world building!

2. Once they pick the cards, create field notes from the future!

At this stage, we rely on the participants’ imagination, and they can also draw inspiration from fictional works they’ve watched or read before. Using the prompts and imaginations, the possibilities are endless! We prepared list of questions to discuss the future world scenario:

What is the year?
What is happening?
What is the new normal in your world?
What is the industry trend in travel in your world?
The rising tech / places? Regulation?
What is the quintessential scenario / daily user activities?

In the field notes from the future, we asked the team to share descriptions of the future world scenario that they have visited. They could also draw or create a mood board to illustrate the scenario.

It was interesting to hear different kinds of future visions from different teams, and the dystopian future narrative was the big theme that came up from the discussion. One group reimagined the future where people maintain a physical and virtual avatar self and everyone is tracked with a microchip inserted into their bodies 👨🏻‍💻.

Example of field notes from the future done by the participants.

💬 Why is it needed?

To set up the future world context before they proceed to brainstorm artifacts from the future.

Phase 3: Reframe the Issue

After sharing their world, it’s time to revisit the topic of travel that the team has previously discussed in the first phase into the future world scenario they have built. This is the time to spot different tensions and contrasts between the current way of traveling versus the future. The objective here is to expand the narrative of the world and try to imagine how the current traveling activity works in their future world.

Example: Reimagine Honeymoon trip in 2052

How is it different in the future world?
What consequences does that have?
Which new user pain points / opportunity spring from this?

Then, we asked the team to create a user’s need statement to conclude their discussion and share back to everyone.

Our user needs a way to _________ because _____________, otherwise _________________________.

For instance, one team reimagined a scenario where people live longer because healthcare becomes more accessible and affordable within the comfort of their home. Thus, medical tourism became a thing of the past and they identified a new need for self-actualization for people to tick off their travel bucket list.

💬 Why is it needed?

To help participants identify future pain points and opportunities in the future world. The user needs statement will help the team to focus on the problem statement that they will solve when creating the artifact of the future.

Phase 4: Ideate Artifact The Future & Present the Ideas

This is the most fun part. As each team identified the problem statement they need to solve in the future, now it’s time to create the future artifact!

We prepared prompts to facilitate the brainstorming:

Each team takes an object and mood card. The object card is an item reimagined as a solution, while the mood card suggests how the user might feel when they experience this artifact.

Ideas gathered from the brainstorming might be super random, but the point is to brainstorm as many ideas and refine the ideas together!

Example of brainstorming process

Then, the team went to the drawing board and presented their refined ideas 🥳 Take a look of some of the future world scenario and artifacts that the participants have created:

At the end of the online workshop, we all had fun and learned something new. As technology is evolving rapidly and the future is unknown, speculating about the future is one of the ways to anticipate future threats and opportunities.

Personal Reflection 🤓

Speculative thinking can be applied for different topics, and there are different tools or methods that can be used to design the workshop. I’m not an expert in this field. My curiosity brought me to experiment with the method and through running the workshop, I gained feedback to improve the workshop design further. If I could redo this workshop, I would slot in more time to reflect on future consequences. Aside from inspiring designers to let their imagination flow freely, the value of speculative thinking is to build designer’s awareness of the unintended consequence of the product or service they launch to the user, which was probably not thoroughly explored during this workshop.

Few tips I’ve learned to improve the session:

🎞 Ask the participants to watch movies, TV shows or read books about the future before the workshop to get them inspired prior to the workshop.

💁🏻 ‍Remind the team to embrace their imagination to paint the future. Aside from developing critical thinking skills, another value from speculative thinking is to express everyone’s ideas and future visions. You could also give them example of brainstormed materials prior to the team discussion

🤔 Not everyone is used to articulating future vision or imagination. For most cases, the facilitator needs to jump in and probe the team when they get stuck. In our case, we had 3 facilitators who occasionally went around different groups.

💬 Give more time for participants to discuss and refine the problem statement. 10 minutes was not enough time for all teams to come up with a specific problem.

Thanks Uka Q.A.P for helping to put up this article!