Summary
In this teaching activity, students will generate future scenarios to imagine and analyse potential widespread consequences, long-term effects and ecological and societal impacts of their own or others’ designs beyond human contexts. The activity will lead students to envision at least one use or future scenario involving more-than-human stakeholders that goes beyond what they would normally describe as the intended use of their design. By applying their understanding of potential consequences and effects on more-than-humans, they may rethink their designs and design decisions.
Motivation
When imagining and describing the intended use of a design concept, students may approach the design from a single, narrow perspective without realizing its potential impact on stakeholders beyond humans. Evidently, designs can have widespread consequences and long-term effects on human as well as more-than-human stakeholders, both in positive and negative ways. If students lack an understanding of the broad impact and long-term effects of their designs, they run the risk of inadvertently causing more harm than good in the world.
For this teaching activity, envisioning criteria are used as a tool for developing future scenarios to analyse and explain a use situation based on four criteria: stakeholders (also including more-than-humans), time, values, and pervasiveness. Each envisioning criteria will draw students’ attention to a particular socio-ecological-technological issue that is important yet easily overlooked (e.g., diverse geographics, political realities, unforeseen effects on indirect stakeholders).
Learning outcomes
After the teaching activity students should be able to:
- generate future scenarios involving more-than-human stakeholders to imagine and analyse potential widespread consequences, long-term effects and ecological and societal impacts of their own or others’ designs,
- apply their understanding of potential widespread consequences and long-term effects on more-than-human stakeholders to rethink their designs and design decisions.
Teacher guidance
| Teaching–learning activities | Group size | Time (Min) |
| Activity 1: The teacher gives an introduction lecture on the importance of being conscious of the broad impact and long-term effects of a design. Examples of utopian/dystopian scenarios are presented for inspiration. The four envisioning criteria are introduced: stakeholders (humans and more-than-humans), time, values and needs, pervasiveness. Examples of envisioning activities are presented as well as some examples of future scenarios. See the example slides for inspiration. |
All | 30 |
| Activity 2: The students are asked to select a design project involving more-than-human stakeholders and develop a future scenario for. It can be a design project that they are working on or a design case selected by the teacher. They can work in groups or individually. |
All | 5 |
| Activity 3: The teacher goes through the process of the activity, instructions, time plan, and envisioning criteria.. The expected outcome is described, which is at least one future scenario for the design, using the envisioning criteria and a reflection on possible consequences for the design. | All | 10 |
| Activity 4: The students imagine one or more future scenarios for a design by using one or more envisioning criteria (stakeholders, time, values, pervasiveness). They may develop both utopian and dystopian versions of the futures. The scenarios can be described in a short story or as a video scenario (see the example slides for examples of short stories). |
All | 60 |
| Activity 5: The students present their future scenarios in plenum. They jointly reflect upon their designs and whether they think the scenario warrants some design changes. |
All | 30 |
| Activity 6: The students share their future scenarios with peers (maybe by uploading them to a shared space). |
All | 30 |
Assessment
Examples of questions to include in an assessment activity to assess whether the intended learning outcomes were attained:
- What envisioning criteria did you apply when imagining and developing the future scenario and why?
- In what ways did the future scenario help you to identify and analyse potential consequences and long-term effects of a design?
- How (if) did the future scenario make you rethink the design/-s and design decisions?
Readings
Friedman, Batya; and Hendry, David (2012). The envisioning cards: a toolkit for catalyzing humanistic and technical imaginations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1145–1148. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208562
Nathan, Lisa P.; Friedman, Batya; Klasnja,Predrag; Kane, Shaun K.; and Miller Jessica K. (2008). Envisioning systemic effects on persons and society throughout interactive system design. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS ’08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394446
Category
Method
Duration
3 h
Materials
Slides (.ppt) (including speaker’s notes) introducing the envisioning future scenario exercise
Paper and pens (or a shared digital sketch space)
Credit
The teaching activity builds on the Envisioning Cards (Friedman & Hendry, 2012) developed by the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab at the Information School at the University of Washington.