As designers and foresight practitioners, we're pretty good at storytelling utopias, ideal experiences, provocative future products, and other end states. However, our partner teams rarely know how to take these ideas from philosophical discussion into productive next steps—especially when our R&D cycles have long tails into "value" metrics that would give us permission to create any of our ideas. How do we answer, "What now?" How do we design interim products that lay foundation for a grander vision? Or, even more aspirational, how do we steer the actions of multiple teams and industries toward a unified, democratized vision…aligning today's competitors into tomorrow's business partners? how do we utilize our role from the inside, to realize real, tangible, and positive change on the outside? In this workshop, I'll share our Future of Freight Vision Timeline—how it was created, the value it provides in design discovery, and how we maintain it recursively. Our activities will use the tool and its associated worksheets to identify long-horizon product opportunities and speculative business models, describe those who will be both positively and negatively impacted by our offering, set a strategic roadmap into this vision including dependencies (cultural, financial, technological, etc.), and finally to identify near-term, actionable, partner-specific product opportunities. This talk is tailored to the designer, product strategist, or any other contributor within a large, reluctant organization or industry, who (like me) struggles to operationalize speculative futures and make a tangible difference that results in positive change.

1. Designing Multi-Partner Transformations
from Democratized Polytopias
into Actionable Next Steps
@anthonydpaul

3. 250,000 marine mammals and birds killed,
plus innumerable sea life

4. Immediate and lasting impacts
• Tourism
• Fishing
• Ecosystem
• Animal balance (otter vs. harbor seal)
@anthonydpaul

5. 5
fatigued crew • neglected CAS • unimplemented redundancies • unfollowed protocols
But I bet the performance metrics were great, up ‘til now.

6. The real cause (not the scapegoats)
• Business opportunities come from exploitation (but don’t have to)
• Didn’t consider other stakeholders, like tourism,
fishing, town, or animals—the system they’re within
• Neglected possibilities—didn’t prepare for the maybes
• No futures modeling (red-teaming, impact studies)
@anthonydpaul

8. Movement of goods and people
• Infrastructure like ports and terminals
• Rail, buses, seafaring vessels, trucking
• Manufacturing of them
• Lifecycles like predictive, condition-based, and routine maintenance
(and the tools and facilities for them)
• Working people, AI, robots
• Shipper customers and local communities
• The devices we use to make decisions
@anthonydpaul

9. Every tiny problem has infinite blind spots
• Voices of the impacted
• Future consequences
• Partners and dependencies
• Global trade, economics, and GDP
• Jobs
• Emissions
• …more
@anthonydpaul

10. “I mean, there's no future in anarchy.
I mean let's face it. But when I was into it, there was
never a thought of the future. I mean we were certain
the world was gonna end, but when it didn't, I had to
do something, so fuck it. I could always be a litigator in
New York and piss the shit out of the judges.
I mean that was me:
a trouble maker of the future.
The guy that was one of those guys that my parents so
arrogantly saved the world for, so we could fuck it up.
We can do a hell of a lot more damage
in the system than outside of it. That
was the final irony, I think.”
—Stevo, SLC Punk!

11. That’s why we’re
here today.
To be troublemakers of the future.
@anthonydpaul

12. Oversimplified, because there’s no “the future”
@anthonydpaul https://sjef.nu/theory-of-change-and-the-futures-cone/

13. Firstly, no future we end up with is singular
There are winners and losers.
Your future and my future are parallel, but unique experiences.
Tightly correlated, but not together.
@anthonydpaul

14. Secondly, infinite parallel futures
We can decide which futures we want.
“Our collective ability to realize a positive future
depends on our collective ability to imagine it.”
— Stuart Candy, TEDx talk
@anthonydpaul

15. The challenge is in
getting everyone
to look in the
same direction.
@anthonydpaul

16. In business: org design and disruption theories, “inertia”
• Culture
• Policies
• Practices
• Processes
• Traditions
• Investments
• Tools
• Incentives
Penchant for status quo
Resistant to deviation/change
Missing the recursive asking if we’re looking in
the right direction. Introspection.
@anthonydpaul

17. In society: institutionalized and systemic problems
• ism
• ism
• ism
• ism
• Ism
Instead of hearing all voices
for shared futuring, allowing
the strongest or the last to
choose direction.
@anthonydpaul

18. 1498, rifling

19. To do what Stuart Candy suggests, we need to find the relationships between individual futures.
We can tightly couple them, like a wire braid—to create inertia toward something positive for each voice.

20. I may skip
some things.
And that’s okay.
@anthonydpaul

21. Today
I want to maximize the tools and lenses I share with you,
in what seems like an abundance of time…
…but in the context of flattened space and time is really
not enough time at all.
Giving you years of work in 3 something hours.
@anthonydpaul

22. All activities are recursion
Research cycles should lead to existential
questions and carry you deeper from reality.
Deeper into possibility.
@anthonydpaul

23. All activities contribute to your artifact
A polytopian, agnostic timeline.
An anchor to get valuable participation from every
conversation, with minimal context-setting.
i.e., a 1:1 should allow you in a brief conversation,
to extract maximum new detail and unique
perspective—precisely what they know.
@anthonydpaul

24. @anthonydpaul

25. Agenda
1. Define the
broad scope
of the system
2. Today and
tomorrow
deltas
3. Ideation for
vision, choices
Many stakeholders
Work is never done
Opportunity fields
Design contexts
Flattening of time and space
Map back into today,
to create a pull
4. Living artifacts
@anthonydpaul

26. Public transit in a post-COVID world
• My map is for freight
• Ours will be for public transit
@anthonydpaul

27. Activity 1 – The Impacted (all, individual)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqQV2Uo=/
1. Stakeholders: double digit birthdate
2. Clustering: single digit birthdate and leap day,
because you’re like having a wild card in UNO
@anthonydpaul

28. Activity 2 – Journey Before COVID (groups)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqHNyT0=/
• Groups of 5, same groups all day
• Take 1 stakeholder or cluster and:
• Left-to-right journey of everything they do
chronologically in an everyday experience BEFORE COVID.
• Add in pain points.
• Restate the pains as opportunities. “It would be great if” (be the person)
@anthonydpaul

29. Activity 3 – Drivers for Change (groups)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqQV2WU=/
• Be specific: “not wanting to touch surfaces” (not “coronavirus”)
• Any other macro trends (social, economic, etc.)
• Stickie notes
@anthonydpaul

30. Activity 4 – IU Matrix (all, individual)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqQV2WU=/
• Your group’s notes
• Impact on “you”
• Uncertainty on how it will play out (volatility)
@anthonydpaul

31. Activity 5 – Quad Futures (groups)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqQSAlY=/
• Choose two, unrelated critical uncertainties
• Label your axes and outcomes
• Write a couple sentences to describe this future
if both conditions are true
@anthonydpaul

32. CONE OF
S

33. @anthonydpaul https://sjef.nu/theory-of-change-and-the-futures-cone/

34. Activity 6 – Journey After COVID (groups)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqQSAmM=/
• Choose 2 future stories from other groups = both are true
• Same stakeholder:
• Left-to-right journey of everything they do
chronologically in an everyday experience within this world.
• All pains from previous journey are solved. (Show, don’t tell.)
• Add in new pain points.
• Restate the new pains as opportunities. “It would be great if” (be the person)
@anthonydpaul

35. Activity 7 – Vision Timeline (all, individual)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqQSAns=/
• Each person, state 1 fact that was good to you:
• A new device invented
• A social change
• A new tool or process
• Etc.
• Place in chronological order
@anthonydpaul

36. @anthonydpaul

37. @anthonydpaul

39. Backcasting to pull us into a preferred future
Build value stories for
otherwise neglected
critical dependencies
“The boring stuff”
https://sjef.nu/theory-of-change-and-the-futures-cone/
@anthonydpaul

40. Experiential artifacts
as a springboard for
each new workshop
Shorter time-to-context.
Deeper into possibility.
@anthonydpaul

43. @anthonydpaul

50. Activity 8 – Opportunity (all, individual)
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kqQSAns=/
• You are a firm (no longer your stakeholder)
• I’ll draw the line
• Describe one solution idea (a product, a service, etc.)
you would provide to this world, to give value
@anthonydpaul

51. Closing – Recursive, existential crisis (volunteers)
Tell us about your idea, but:
• How does it alter the future world?
• Who does it impact and how?
• Does it change our environment?
• Does it create a new need?
And:
• Who is it bad for?
• How can it become unethical, weaponized, abused?
• Could those be mitigated with redesign?
@anthonydpaul

52. Closing – Context is fleeting
• We erroneously design within today,
something that will impact tomorrow
• Constraints are disposable
• Shop ideas across contexts,
stories, and futures quads
Does it still have value?
Can you harden against whichever future we receive?
Can we choose and create a polytopian future together?
@anthonydpaul
5 whys
Elon Musk’s “First
Principles Thinking”
Introducing anything
into a system,
changes the system.

53. Thank you
@anthonydpaul most places
@transfuturists on Instagram
See also:
PRIMER19 • Leah Zaidi https://vimeo.com/346062857
PRIMER19 • Joe Tankersley https://vimeo.com/345854380
PRIMER19 • (my talk) https://vimeo.com/347192636