My experiment with Speculative Design
The graduation season had arrived. Everybody was talking about their companies, their graduation project, their project guides and their topics. I put a lot of deliberation in choosing mine.
I decided to settle down on the topic “Future of Finance” . It is an intersection of speculation, finance and technology. In finance, the payment domain was considered because the user interaction was found to be maximum here.
Why speculative design, you say?
Working on speculative design would include critical design thinking, research and storytelling, all three subjects of my interest.
What attracted me towards speculative design is that it tries to imagine what it would be like to design without current limitations of technology, culture and politics in mind. Speculative Design is a design method addressing big societal problems by looking towards the future and creating products and services for those scenarios. I would recommend a book called “Speculative everything” by Fiona Raby and Anthony Dune.
Here considering the project looks towards future, the time is considered to be 2035.
The aim of the project was a speculative scenario and a complimentary artefact which acts as the start of larger discussion around futures of current behaviours.
Driving forces, also known as signals of change, trends, triggers, drivers are technologies, events, business models, inventions existing today, which may shape and change the today and future world. They provide direction towards evolution.
The considered examples of driving forces are digital currency, BNPL(Buy Now Pay Later), Sustainable banking, block chain, Open Banking, neobanks, personal data services (PDS), data commoditization, etc. After considering a bunch of topics, a few were selected.
Cashless world was a driving force or a signal of change which I decided to focus on. Global cashless payment volumes are set to increase by more than 80% from 2020 to 2025 and almost triple till 2030 according to PwC and Strategy. It is estimated that India’s digital payments industry will grow to more than 300% of its current size by 2025.
To examine the focused signal, a Google form survey was done with multiple users from various demographics. This helped me to understand user perception on the topic. Interesting statements were picked. Various scenarios were formed considering the signals.
“What would the world look like if it goes cashless?” was starting point taken to generate multiple scenarios. Every country, every institution is taking steps towards going cashless. This signal was found most plausible and relevant, thus was thought to be the most relevant.
A futures wheel was made considering the starting point and discovered signals.
There can be numerous ways to go about with speculative design. I decided to consider a template by Viraj Joshi which I found helpful here.
Futures thinking workshop :
A futures thinking workshop was conducted for scenario creation.
Scenario generation requires imagination, requires creativity. And what better way to create than to collaborate?
After conducting scenario generation workshop, and analysing the signals with multiple tools three most thought-inducing scenarios were selected. These scenarios were chosen on the basis of how provocative, relative and plausible they are.
1) How might the world be where people have lost their financial data privacy?
2) How might the world be when a cashless society is exclusive of vulnerable people? ( Vulnerable to education, technology)
3) How might the world be where people have lost control over spending because of the cashless payments?
A futures cone was mapped to study the three considered scenarios and select the most intriguing one.
The framed design brief was —
“How might we use futures thinking to provoke a reflection on the changed spending behaviour with the advent of digital payments?”
For speculation purposes the brief was -
“How might the world be where the youth has lost control over spending?”
Speculative scenario — The generated scenario was — It’s 2035, and India goes cashless with complete demonetisation 2.0
The switch was hard giving rise to Compulsive Shopping Disorder.
The government has realised this problem and has come up with a solution which is called the “Saver Mode System”
I managed to come up with artefacts to help with the solution.
Artefa
The more I searched, the more ideas I imagined, the more I wanted to explore, the more probabilities I created, the more areas I wanted to dig into. However compiling all of my ideas, research and provocations I carried out my project in certain manner. It was a hard task! There are so many areas I could wander into but I had to stick to a way else I would be still wandering. Having identified speculative design in this project I want to explore it more. I have many ideas in my mind to do so, hoping to execute on them soon.
Thank You :)
