Specification:

PILLAR:

Technology and Design

Design phase:

Ideation

SOLO TAXONOMY LEVEL:

Extended Abstract

TIME:

Short

In this teaching activity, students will generate future scenarios in order to imagine and analyse potential widespread consequences, long-term effects and societal impacts of their own or others’ designs. The activity will lead students to envision at least one use or user scenario that goes beyond what they would normally describe as the intended use of their design. By applying their understanding of potential consequences and effects, they may rethink their designs and design decisions.

When focusing on users and user experiences, students may approach their own or others’ designs from a single, narrow perspective without realizing its potential impact on a broader society. Evidently, designs can have widespread consequences and long term effects on various stakeholders beyond the stakeholders initially imagined, both in positive and negative ways.

If students lack an understanding of the broad impact and long term effects of their designs, they run the risk of inadvertently causing more harm than good in society.

For this teaching activity, envisioning prompts are used as a tool for developing future scenarios to analyse and explain a use or user situation based on four criteria (stakeholders, time, values, pervasiveness). Each envisioning prompt will draw students’ attention to a particular socio-technical issue that is important yet easily overlooked (e.g., diverse geographics, political realities, obsolescence).

The teaching activity builds on the Envisioning Cards (Friedman & Hendry, 2012) developed by the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab at the Information School at the University of Washington. However, since these cards are not freely available, the main concepts are explained without requiring purchase of the cards.

After the teaching activity students will be able to:

• generate future scenarios in order to imagine and analyse potential widespread consequences, long-term effects and societal impacts of their own or others’ designs,
• apply their understanding of potential widespread these consequences and long-term effects to potentially rethink their design and design decisions.

• Prepare a handout of the provided envisioning prompts.
• Prepare a short introduction lecture on the importance of being conscious of the broad impact and long term effects of a design (see e.g. the teaching activity Introduction to Values in design). You may also want to use some examples of utopian/dystopian scenarios using different media such as text (e.g., Isaac Asimov’s Foundation) or video (e.g., A trailer of the Black Mirror episode on parental surveillance, Netflix, 2017). Also, include the four criteria (stakeholders, time, values, and pervasiveness). See the provided slides for examples of envisioning activities for each of the four criteria and some example scenarios from the paper by Nathan et al. (2008).
• The activity can be done individually or as a group activity. In case of a group activity, arrange settings for group work (suggested size: 3-5 persons per group).

1. Give the lecture that you have prepared.
2. Ask the students to select a project that they are developing as a group or that they have developed on their own, or present an example design case that they can develop a scenario for.
3. Walk through the process of the activity, instructions, timeplan, and envisioning prompts. Describe the expected outcome, which is at least one future scenario for the design, using one or more of the envisioning criteria, and a reflection on possible consequences for the design. The scenarios can be described in a short story or as a video scenario. See the provided slides for examples of short stories.
4. The students imagine one or more possible future scenarios (as a short story or a video) for their designs by using one or more envisioning prompts pertaining to the four criteria (stakeholders, time, values, pervasiveness). They may develop both utopian and dystopian versions of the futures.
5. Highlight the fact that problems can be seen from multiple angles, and remind the students to think beyond the narrow utilitaristic design perspective.
6. Share and summarise insights from the teaching activity and ask students to reflect upon their own designs and whether they think the scenario warrants some design changes. Remind them to explore various problem solving strategies such as service design, infrastructures and policy making. This can be documented separately or as part of their design documentation.

To assess whether the intended learning outcomes were attained by the teaching activity the following assessment activities can be carried out (in class or after class).

Assessing students' learning by asking them to apply their learning about future scenarios on a case study (summative assessment) by imagining and analysing potential consequences, long-term effects or societal impacts of a design through a value scenario using relevant envisioning criteria (including values) and prompts. Ask students to focus on use or user scenarios that go beyond what they would normally describe as the intended use of the design.

Assess students' learning by asking them to hold a value-based exhibition or public workshop (authentic assessment) presenting 1) the original design, 2) their envisioning prompts and their particular socio-technical issues 3) the developed future scenario and how it makes them rethink the designs.

In the assessment activity ask students to focus on:

• describing what envisioning criteria and prompts are relevant to apply for a specific case,
• imagining potential consequences, long-term effects and societal impacts of a design through a value scenario that goes beyond what would normally be described as intended use, using relevant envisioning criteria (including values) and prompts,
• analysing the potential consequences of a design using relevant envisioning criteria (including values) through a value scenario and providing suggestions for how to mitigate negative consequences (e.g. in regards to re-design, further stakeholder dialogue, possible tensions) through rethinking the design.

Friedman, Batya; and Hendry, David (2012). The envisioning cards: a toolkit for catalyzing humanistic and technical imaginations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1145–1148. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208562

Nathan, Lisa P.; Friedman, Batya; Klasnja,Predrag; Kane, Shaun K.; and Miller Jessica K. (2008). Envisioning systemic effects on persons and society throughout interactive system design. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394446

Netflix (2017, Nov 25). Black Mirror - Arkangel Official Trailer. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yef_HfQoBd8