Bringing Future Concepts to Life

Future Fictions bring technical and complex futures concepts to life, enabling people to make decisions in the context of tomorrow rather than today.

By definition, Futures concepts are set in a future, unfamiliar and potentially transformed context. The concepts are intended to address something that doesn’t exist today or using a technology that hasn’t been researched or even thought of yet.

Faced with this situation, our brains seek to hook onto something familiar from the past that provides a reference point to help us contextualise and understand the new concept.

This is unhelpful, as our biases affect our ability to make high-quality decisions about the concept and its implications on operating environments, technology strategies or the future workforce.

Furthermore, the concepts themselves might be quite abstract and difficult to explain, leading to difficulty getting stakeholders to engage with them and understand their implications.

This can cause problems in getting sponsorship of the concept and even funding for further development. 

A Better Way to Present Concepts

Future Fictions are novel, engaging, experiential or immersive ways to present innovation concepts. They are designed to create multi-sensory experiences to clearly communicate the concept and its implications. 

This helps people to make decisions in the context of tomorrow rather than today as a Future Fiction can improve the understanding of the situation that the concept is addressing, the concept itself and its intended impact.  

There are many types of Future Fictions - including sketches, models, virtual reality models, playbooks and games. The “artefact” that is created depends on the specific project, the complexity of the concept, the story that you want to build around it and the intended audience.

A prime example is the Museum of the Future in Dubai where a range of environments set 50 years in the future were imagined and brought to life in immersive ways so that people engaged deeply with how the future could look, smell and feel.

When developing Future Fictions we use our 4Ds methodology to:

• Gain an understanding of the concept to be communicated (DIAGNOSE)

• Generate ideas to bring the concept to life (DEVELOP)

• Deliver an immersive solution to engage stakeholders (DELIVER)

• Support the client to implement the solution (DO)