Future Foresight Case Studies
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
— William Gibson
This quote from science fiction author William Gibson is probably the most over-cited I can think of to describe the business of futures foresight, but in practice I find it to be a pretty good summary of the methodologies I’ve used in my career to project future states of the market and of evolving user need. For one it calls on us to be constantly vigilant in our sensing of emerging behaviors, techologies, and business practices and then connect these signals into observations of emerging trends. Second, it suggests we should be on the lookout for lead users whose specialized set of requirements might predict those of the broader market in the future. And just as NASA might set up a habitat in the desert to simulate the conditions of a future Mars mission, my team on occasion has developed analogs of future usage conditions to help understand possible future requirements. Below I have set our examples of all three types of work.
Crowdsourced Trends Sensing
Intel’s strategic planning function has run a future foresights program since the mid-2000s. For most of my career I’ve supported this process from a UX research function. In 2017 I was asked to take over the program and redesign it from scratch.
Qualitative Lead User Research
Prior to the introduction of the iPhone, no one in mobile phone industry really understood the potential of location on phones outside of map directions. Intel had the opportunity to invest in new location technologies, and I was asked to identify latent consumer needs around location that would indicate a bigger market opportunity. I lead a team of ethnographic researchers in a global search for lead users/markets that predicted the boom just two years later in location-based applications.
Analogs and Simulation of Future UIs
How do you measure user experience quality, much less go about quantifying requirements, on a new to the world product category for which there are almost no established testing methods yet? …Oh and we didnt have a prototype of a working AR device either. Well, you go searching for adjacent products that have many of the same HCI challenges, and sometimes you create your own “analogs” to simulate the future projected product experience.