Day 05. Activating Corporate Futures

Enterprise Speculative Practices: A Trojan-Horse method for bringing speculative design to a large-scale enterprise

Friday June 26, 12:00pm EDT
🔌 Talk, 45 minute session

At IBM, our work centers around solving users' needs and improving their lives through human-centered product and service design for enterprise-grade technologies. But we noticed that something was missing from our technology-building culture; the ability to think beyond the needs of an individual today and design for a future humanity.

Speculative design can take on many forms, but from our point of view it's a way to envision future scenarios that question the potential cultural, social and ethical outcomes of technology and results in the creation of products, services, and intellectual property that solves for those scenarios and questions. So, how might we do that at a company that's the scale of IBM?

To start, we needed to democratize the process of speculation to turn hundreds-of-thousands of IBMers into future forecasters. By developing a 3-phase approach – Realize > Evangelize > Normalize – we produced a series of projects that won the hearts and minds of our executives and resulted in the inclusion of speculative design as a core part of IBM’s award-winning Enterprise Design Thinking framework.

By sharing the details of our approach for building inclusive, democratized, and scaleable speculative design practices in enterprise environments, we hope to equip our audience with the skills and strategies to move speculative design out from the shadows and the hands of the few, and into a standard practice for organizations across the globe.