A generative card deck to envision scenarios and artefacts from the future
On November 7th, Silvio and I, ran our first futurish cards virtual workshop Speculative Futures Seattle online meetup, and we launched the new virtual version of the deck we had been working on in the past months.
futurish cards is a generative card deck that facilitates reflections about the future by helping individuals and teams generate future scenarios and artefacts.
How futurish cards project started
Both me and Silvio are designers, working everyday on defining new effective design solutions. About a year ago, we started to reflect on the responsibility we have to make sense of the complex and changing world, designing not just for the present but also for a preferable future.
We drew from design future practises like speculative design, critical design and design fiction and we came out with the idea to create a ready-to-use tool that could encourage anyone to stretch their imaginations and generate alternative visions for the future.
Inspired by Near Future Laboratory’s DF-DBCPC 0–7 and Situation Lab’s The Thing From The Future, we designed a generative card deck, made of 50 cards that could be combined to create different prompts to help people playing with future scenarios and artefacts.
The deck was launched during Milan Interaction week, in February 2020, at EduSummit20, where we hosted a 4 hours workshop for educators, practitioners and academic directors from all over the world (see this post for more details).
futurish cards virtual version
After running couples of more sessions with futurish cards and testing new workshop formats, we found ourselves locked in our homes thanks to Covid-19.
The Pandemic forced us to rethink how futurish cards might evolve in a virtual version.
The result of our work is a digital tool composed by a Miro board and two prompt pages, a scenario generation prompt page and artefact generation prompt page, for running futurish cards remote workshops.
The digital tool is available on futurish.cards website, under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
Feel free to use the digital tool and drop us a line if you have any questions or feedbacks at futurishcards@gmail.com
