Strange Attractor

• Documented scenarios from the session, with the card combinations that generated them.
• Consequence maps per scenario: what risks and opportunities does the scenario create?
• Tagged output from the group pass: Signals, Wants, Watches.
• For the full day: focused scenarios tied to something your organisation is actually working on.
• You get a few Design Fiction Kit decks that you can use to run your own ideation and consequence sessions.

You can either go into the session with a clear product, relationship, attribute or trend — and we'll create material design fictions based on that — or we can use the Design Fiction Kit to generate a completely novel scenario. We discuss before the session which works best for you.

The Design Fiction Kit process relies on four categories of concepts, and it is the Archetype card that is the mechanism that makes this different from every other futures exercise. It's an artefact from the future — an information booklet, an ID card, a product manual — something with a function you recognise from today even though its form has changed. The Archetype represents the human need and the social situation.

Without anchoring the future in a human context, material futures default to inventing interesting gadgets and services that reflect the team's technical skill and imagination, but which don't challenge their thinking about how society works. The Archetype forces a position: this object exists in a human world, it serves someone specific, it has a social logic.

After each scenario is presented, the group does a consequence pass: who benefits from this future, and who is made worse off? The first level of each answer must name a specific person, group, or human condition — not a general effect. This prevents the session from producing abstract futures with no one in them. People are always affected by the futures you create — by identifying these effects as broadly as possible we can better identify your challenges and opportunities.

Half day — open format: Scenarios are unconstrained. Ends with the consequence pass and a group tagging round: Signal (already happening somewhere), Want (worth working toward), Watch (worth keeping an eye on).

Full day — focused format: The morning runs as an open session to build familiarity with the method. In the afternoon, we replace a few of the cards with something you want to examine more deeply — a specific user, a technology, a context you're designing for. The consequence pass in the afternoon has a different quality, where we dive deeper into how real people and social contexts are affected by the scenario you're examining.