Organizational Prototyping with Design Fiction
From climate change to artificial intelligence, it is often difficult to imagine how these changes might transform the ways organizations operate and work.
When working on The Manual of Design Fiction we decided to give a rather broad description of the practice:
Design fiction is the practice of creating tangible and evocative prototypes from possible near futures, to help discover and represent the consequences of decision making. — The Manual of Design Fiction
However, a good part of the work with design fiction (including ours) involves imagining commercial products from the future, their usage, the user experiences and the cultural phenomena developing around them. In this article, I argue that prototypes can take the shape of an organization to explore the implications and consequences of global changes.
In an uncertain future marked by climate change and technological transformations, how might the nature of an organization evolve? Whether that organization is an enterprise, part of the administration, an NGO or other, what might be its future values, policies, employees’ skills and ways of operating? Those are the questions that leaders of organizations must explore simultaneously. Surprisingly, there is limited foresight work on these questions to feed their thinking.
In France, Plurality University Network intends to fill that gap. Led by Daniel Kaplan, the Emerging Enterprise project brings together representatives from businesses operating in France, as well as one trade union (CFDT), and researchers. Together, they developed ten “archetypes” of corporate organizations of the future. Their methodology blended classic foresight elements with the use of imagination and the participation of (mostly science fiction) writers who helped tell the stories of companies of the year 2050. Some organizational structures are quite different from today’s corporations, others more recognizable yet significantly transformed. For instance, A Guild provides a certain category of professionals with a stable or even lifelong job and the conditions for their continued development, while placing them with organizations that need their skills. Or, an Entrepocene (a portmanteau that combines entreprise in French with anthropocene) does not set out to change the world, but endeavors not to make it worse.
But, practically, how do these archetypes translate into the life of an organization? How do they change an organization’s structure, processes, or culture? Akin to prototyping in the design and engineering fields, organizational prototyping aims at exploring new ways of working, management structures, and team configurations to learn what could work best in their specific context. Besides getting people inspired and on board with the notion of change, the objective is to create a tangible representation that shows what change could look like inside an organization. This is what design fiction prototypes are good at. They reveal the ways futures could come to life and show what ‘might come soon’ be like in the form of material objects — the tangible artifacts from the future.
Reporting back instead of pitching forward
In 2020, Julian Bleecker, co-founder of OMATA was going through a founding round for his start-up. Pioneer in the field of design fiction, Julian did not want the usual investor Pitch Deck. Instead he chose to publish a fictional Annual Report of his company. Set in the future, this design fiction prototype shared not only Julian’s vision but how he had planned to execute it. In “Why Did I Write An ‘Annual Report’ From The Future?” he describes the document that contained three categories including Team and Workshop. It covered in detail the profile of people who would belong to the organization, where and how they would work. Instead of pitching forward into the future, Julian showed how an entrepreneur can report back from the future as if it has happened:
“The biggest benefit to this was it refined my own sense of what it was I wanted to achieve, the purpose and values that would be imbued in the OMATA brand and products, and the kind of team and customers I imagine would be part of that future”. — Julian Bleecker, OMATA
The Annual Report works well for a small group to test their assumptions and explore unexpected evolutions for their organization.
At Girardin & Nova, we engage with global challenges and emerging technologies that are often seen as abstract, complex and remote from everyday life. Our job is to simulate, as closely as possible, a reality accessible to many stakeholders of organizations and sometimes the public.
Make an organization travel to a future without actually going there
In recent work for the Swiss Federal Office for Defense Procurement and its technology foresight program known as deftech (Defense Future Technologies), along with Nicolas Nova, Nicolás Bronzina and Israel Viadest, we explored the potential evolutions of technologies and equipment designed for both civilian and military purposes. Instead of anticipating their detailed operations or the plausibility of emerging technologies, we imagined how they would transform the ways the armed forces operate, their values, their missions and the necessary new skills to achieve them.
The Swiss military system is organized as a militia army, which means that most soldiers are not professionals. Each soldier is required to have a service booklet (Livret de service in French, Dienstbüchlein in German), which traces his or her career from the first day of recruitment to the many specializations and promotions they acquire along the way. It is a common object that is part of the Swiss culture making it an ideal candidate for a design fiction.
The result depicts an evolution of the relationship between the Swiss armed forces, the militia and the civilian population. The document makes it possible to discover the types of competences acquired by a new kind of specialist called a “natural resources soldier”. It also highlights how the armed forces operate in “mixed mode” with soldiers combining face-to-face service with remote contributions and training.
Imagine how climate change and technological transformations would transform the ways the organization operates
In another exploration with deftech, we looked at the key role played by diasporas in supporting a country’s defense and resilience efforts. Around 10% of Swiss people live abroad, many of them with great professional success. With the question “What if this 5th Switzerland could make its knowledge and skills available to support the country’s resilience”, we prototyped a Training Center called RESINT (Swiss RESilience INTernational Support). We went into the details of describing the missions, the values, the history, the types of volunteers and the syllabus of the education programs. We created a fictional website to have that possible future feel as if it could become a reality tomorrow.
It made us question how RESINT volunteers would collaborate and the type of communication network they would need. Based on existing technological developments, we imagined RESNET: a resilient communications network available to Swiss citizens and organizations in the event of a crisis. We designed its user manual to translate that rather complex and abstract concept into a format most people understand.
To explore the potential life of RESINT volunteers, we developed the video of María Fernanda López Camors, a fictional Swiss mathematician based in Mexico, widely recognized for her “Terre Data” channel’s contribution to the public understanding of science. Specializing in soil science, her media work delves into crucial topics in the field. In this video, she opens her Individual Digital Package (IDP), a key step allowing her to actively participate in RESINT missions.
For the Swiss Federal Office for Defense Procurement, the aims of prototyping RESINT are to:
- Stimulate the imagination about accessing the know-how of Swiss people abroad made available by emerging technologies in order to support the country’s defense.
- Clarify whether this scenario should be explored further and, if so, how.
- Map and define the role of the various players (armed forces, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, etc.) if a more detailed exploration is implemented.
So far, RESINT has generated curiosity and interest among the Swiss political and security communities. Quentin Ladetto, who is leading the armasuisse Federal Office for Defense Procurement’s foresight programme uses the design fiction prototype to elicit sufficient buy-in and resources to support further discovery.
“The first step towards the journey of the implementation is done, as it is now possible to criticize, challenge and build on this first iteration”.
— Quentin Ladetto, Head of Technology Foresight, armasuisse, Science and Technology
Thanks to the enthusiasm of the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (OSA) and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA), a large survey was launched on different channels to reach the 800’000+ population to better understand how the Swiss nationals abroad would perceive the creation of an organization like RESINT. Collecting this feedback is a first to complete the objectives listed above. Processing this “big data” comes with additional technological challenges. For Quentin, it’s clear that making a design fiction instead of writing a report, brings the organization to life and a possible future suddenly exists for the people exposed to it:
Personally, this project gives me a sense of participation and usefulness, allowing me to contribute to Switzerland, even from a distance.
— A participant to the RESINT survey
An observatory of a world we all might experience soon
The work on RESINT is an example of a Design Fiction prototype that opens a decision-making process to multiple players, from the sponsor of the exploration (Swiss Federal Office for Defense Procurement) to politicians and the indirect stakeholders, such as the general public.
A final example is Dubai Future Foundation’s (DFF) use of Design Fiction to show wide audiences “what could be” and encourage future-forward public policy in the administration. In The Manual of Design Fiction, the former Futurist-in-Chief at DFF Noah Raford describes how he baked the Design Fiction mindset into Dubai’s Museum of the Future. Opened in 2022, one of the museum’s missions is to give shape to hypothetical scenarios and be a “gigantic feedback-generation machine”.
“Design Fiction becomes the means of translating early warning indicators into something physical and immediately relatable that people can react to. It helps punch through people’s field of manufactured normalcy and demonstrate why something matters.”
— Noah Raford, former Futurist-in-Chief and Chief of Global Affairs at Dubai Future Foundation
The examples of organizational prototyping described in this article show how making a scenario become reality offers leaders and stakeholders a “safe space” to experience potential profound changes in an organization. The prototypes do not solve any specific problem, but open up the field of possibilities including multiple viewpoints. They simulate, as closely as possible, a reality accessible to organizations.
My name is Fabien Girardin. I am a researcher and engineer in emerging technologies, managing partner at Girardin & Nova and co-author of The Manual of Design Fiction. With a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Digital Communication and 15 years of experience in academia and the industry, my mission is to help organizations prototype and discover ‘what might come next’ just beyond the core of their activities.
