When you’re running a workshop in speculative fiction it can be difficult to strike a balance between being prescriptive – giving people explicit instructions – or taking a more hands-off approach

In an attempt to bridge the gap I’ve created three worksheets that can help people to get going. They offer three common approaches to developing future scenarios:

• Describe the relationships between the different parts of the scenario – this is focused on fleshing out material artefacts that might be generated from Design Fiction.
• Timeline of your scenario – what needs to happen in the world in order for your scenario to be realised? I use the STEEP model – Society, Technology, Economics, Environment, Policy – but the general purpose is to tease out what might be a driver for the change. Is it ecological necessity, a financial crash, a change in national legislation?
• Storyboarding is a process from filmmaking where you draw frames from a camera point of view, and describe what is happening. You don’t need to be good at drawing – stick figures are fine – but think about the action of the scene. Who is doing what? What happens next? Or if you have an idea of how something looks or works, try to draw that. The point is to make the situation and action as clear to you as possible.

Since I’m still working on the translation to Swedish of the Design Fiction Kit by Julian Bleecker I’ve added the four DFK categories to the top of the sheets, but if you’re generating scenarios in another way you can just ignore those and use the rest of the worksheet. Some of them will work better than others, but it’s a work in progress.

The sheets are sized to A5 and my goal is to print these on a Risograph and offer them as tear-off blocks that you can bring to your workshop and give to participants.

I’ve created two versions of the sheets – one with a prefilled scenario, and one without – and you can download them below. All files are in PDF format with three sheets each.

Prefilled worksheets, English
Blank worksheets, English
Prefilled worksheets, Swedish
Blank worksheets, Swedish

If you have any feedback or comments, do get in touch: contact@hintlab.org – I’d love to hear from you.