Future Scouting: How to design future inventions to change today by combining speculative design, design fiction, design thinking, life-centred design, and science fiction

by Damien Lutz

Inside this book lies a multi-future time machine, and by the time you finish reading it, you'll be plucking inventions from many possible futures-but you won't need expert forecasting or complex data analysis skills to do it.

Future Scouting is a fun and practical step-by-step guide to designing fantastic and thought-provoking prototypes to inspire better tomorrows-an exciting practice known as speculative design, or design fiction. Using a back-casting design approach-and included downloadable worksheets-you'll learn how to research, ideate, sketch, and storify, to:
- Catch a signal of emerging change
- Design a future invention- Ideate a key scenario
- Extrude a hero and future world
- Compile your artefacts into a shareable prototype.

Drawing on the great work of future studies and speculative design practitioners past and present, Future Scouting combines product design, design thinking, life-centred design, and science fiction into one complete method to get you saving the world and back to the present well before the next pandemic.

Genres: Design

159 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2021

About the author

Damien Lutz is a Sydney-based UX designer, researcher, teacher and writer. He is the author of the speculative design guide Future Scouting, The Life-centred Design Guide, and two science fiction novels, The Lenz and Amanojaku. He also writes about emerging and experimental design on Medium and runs workshops and guest lectures.

Damien has made it his personal purpose to scout the fringes of design to empower the community with more awareness of what can be done with design to create a kinder and more regenerative world, for today and tomorrow.

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Future Scouting is another entry in the increasingly crowded world of speculative design, a system for coming up with interesting and helpful ideas about the future. Now, to lay my credentials out, I am a published futurist and I've been working on my own system, Eventuality, to help small groups of people do futures thinking in a reasonable timeframe. So while there is an element of sour grapes, in that Future Scouting exists and Eventuality doesn't it, trust me when I say that this is a hard question, and that when I find the thing the works I'll shout it from the heavens.

With all of that in mind, Future Scouting is adequate but underbaked, a bricolage of techniques grabbed from other speculative design practices. The skeleton is actually pretty solid. Taking your values, grab a hold of an emerging social or technological signal and imagine a near future object, person, and location. Then considered the direct and indirect consequences of the world that you've created. And finally reflect back and sum up.

It's a solid backbone, but Lutz recommends turning to other speculative design sources to come up with the actual meat of provocative issues and trends. If you're stuck or lost, there's not much to get you started. Similarly, while there is a suggestion to reflect and perhaps collaborate with others, there's no structure or reward for doing so.

If you know what you're doing, Future Scouting will likely work, and if you don't, good luck. At the end of the day, there not enough originality or rigor for me to strongly recommend this method.

[Kristoffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two and a half stars, rounded up. A mixed bag of mixed methods and tools pulled from various discursive design and futurology disciplines. Unstructured and unedited, superficial and at times impractical it is not for the complete beginner in design fiction or speculative design, where the works by Dunne & Raby and Bleecker are far better entry points, and then to follow up with some other guidebook like Designing Futures by Gross. But for the reader with some experience in the field Future Scouting provides some inspiration in the form of tools and pointers to resources, to build upon or do better.