ESP: Enterprise Speculative Practices
Co-founder of a movement to bring the powers of speculative design to the masses.
“I think y’alls phased Trojan Horse approach to normalizing speculative methods is very clever.”
Adam Zeiner, Design Futures Initiative (DFI) Board Member
It started with a chat in the kitchen of our Austin design studio. My colleague Michael Kenney and I both bonded over our mutual backgrounds in speculative design and strategic foresight since our first day at IBM. Now, we are co-creating a set of innovation frameworks to help turn hundreds of thousands of IBMers into future forecasters.
But how can you bring a fringe methodology to large enterprise organizations? Our goal is to democratize speculative design. To introduce the practice, we Trojan Horsed a set of design fiction articles based on our IBM Research colleagues’ predictions, 5 in 5.
After piquing interest and showing the value from an intellectual property perspective, we created the first contributor-added IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Toolkit, Speculative Design Stories. This toolkit empowers teams to think beyond next quarter and imagine new markets 10, 15, even 20 years down the line.
Most recently, we’ve been asked to apply our expertise as part of IBM Design’s response to COVID-19. We created an innovation framework, ‘Design the New Normal’ where we merge elements from our toolkit, strategic foresight, and COVID-19 specific factors to inspire and imagine life post-pandemic. This work will result in an external media publication and internal partnerships to generate technology and solutions for social good.
IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Toolkit
Our toolkit, Speculative Design Stories, is the first in a planned series of toolkits helping IBMers and external users critically consider and design for the future. By creating and evangelizing democratized practices, we ensure our future is informed by all, regardless of discipline, background, or previous exposure to future-forecasting practices.
What People Are Saying
“I would love to use this with a client. Our clients want to start small with blockchain but the whole point of why we’re there is to help them think big. This would help them think outside the box. It’s less about the technology and more about imagining a grander scale…this unleashes that.”
— Lead, IBM Blockchain Services
“This is a really good exercise to push the absurd…way more effective for that than just big ideas only.”
— Designer, IBM Client Services
“It doesn’t force you to think about your here and now user. People shut off their own creativity. They’re too in their heads about the details of today. This activity frees them to think bigger and solve for the future.”
— Content Lead, IBM Design
On average, teams generated 12 to 15 big ideas for intellectual property within a 90 minute session.
‘Design the New Normal’
We were asked to apply our speculative design expertise to help engage the 2500+ community of IBM Designers. We created an innovation framework titled ‘Design the New Normal’ where we ask IBMers to submit “In a world..” prompts that begin to critically imagine life post-pandemic. Through the use of COVID-19 specific driving forces and generative design, we encourage lateral thinking. This work is underway and will be both internally and externally published.
A proposal for the inclusion of speculative design practices within IBM Enterprise Design Thinking.
In order to initially introduce speculative design to IBM, we Trojan Horsed a set of 5 articles with the help of talented writers, designers, and content creators to use the power of narrative and idea extraction. These 5 short stories were each based on a technology prediction from IBM Research and were included as the featured spread in our IBM Design magazine, Variable. This magazine is distributed globally across studios and gave us the leverage to pitch our idea to senior executives for formal buy-in.
Project Roles
Co-founder
Co-founder of Speculative Enterprises, pioneering the democratization and scaling of speculative design and related future studies.
Principle Designer & Project Manager
Leading the vision, executive communication, project management, and final delivery of the COVID-19 response, ‘Design the New Normal’ alongside IBM Distinguished Designers.