Introducing the Actionable Futures Toolkit
Design is an act that intrinsically lives in the future. To see clearly beyond the next revision requires sensitivity and understanding of larger systems at play: macro and micro trends, foresight and business strategy, all blended together with design. That is why we created this toolkit and are now sharing it for free.
Over the last decade, design has made its way into the spotlight. Even more so now that everyone can be a designer, the practice and practitioners are somewhat in a middle of an identity crisis. Everything can be measured now in realtime, and incremental, iterative design is on its way to be automated. When design is everywhere in the fabric of our work and culture, what role does this leave for designers then?
We’ve noticed one thing. As technology moves faster, predicting futures has become more difficult. Everything moving faster in more complex environments makes everything harder to anticipate. In order to build a plausible future beyond the next PI planning, one needs a robust set of tools to do so. One that doesn’t end up at mapping and clustering in Powerpoint, but has solid mechanisms for delivery and organisational alignment to ensure we’ll get there.
There are foresight and trend analysis tools on the market but we didn’t feel any of the available options would work for us, in the way we wanted. So we created our own.
The futures do not just happen, they are created by our actions
The Actionable Futures Toolkit is a set of canvases made to work for you in building and aligning a future for an organisation, service or a product.
The usage varies regarding the scope and context, but so far we have run this with a large financial organisation, an advanced R&D unit, a media company and several startups. And it works beautifully. Now we want to share our work with the world, with learnings and instructions on how to run the session once, consecutively and in parts over time. This makes an excellent way to dive deep into the strategy and business models that make futures real.
The Actionable Futures Toolkit is a modular set of tools that can be run in various ways, from a general tool to discover and ideate futures, to a premeditated, repeated and ever focusing exercise to build a vision on one or more business areas. The toolkit can also be used to bring transparency and alignment to any organization through repeated exercises.
The Actionable Futures Toolkit consists of three parts: Worldbuilding, Predictive Analysis and the Optimal Futures. Each of these are laid out on a master canvas with three sections each, tailored for group work.
In the following days and weeks, we’ll be posting examples on how to run this thing, and also a few extra user submitted canvases. Meanwhile, we encourage you to go download our toolkit, use it, remix it and pay it forward. The world needs better futures now more than ever, and as designers and makers it is our duty to make the tangible, and actionable.
