1. THE MAP OF THE FUTURE
Visualization design case study

2. background
• IFTF launched Superstruct
– a massively multiplayer online role playing game that
outlined the world of the future
• 6 weeks game came to its conclusions
– hundreds of ideas,
– superstructures for our future,
– guidelines to redefine the world of today
– guidelines to improve and prepare it for the challenges of
the next decade

3. background
• 6 weeks game came to its conclusions
– from big new infrastructure projects to
nanotechnology,
– from overcoming economies of scale to projects of
“vertical farming”
–…

4. background
• Client (WIRED magazine) asked us to visualize
the complex net of ideas and assumptions that
game‟s users produced

5. background
• “The goal of the project is to engage a broad
public in considering the dilemmas we face in
our current, everyday lives and think together
about resolutions that go beyond the familiar
ways of dealing with problems”
– Jane Mc Gonigal, Superstruct game designer

6. The design process
• Goal
– As designers, our work consisted in representing
visually all the scenarios and give the viewers a look
of what they might expect for the next 10 years. To do
that, we followed an initial two-step-analysis:

7. The design process
• 1. create a logic structure, find patterns and
correlations between the different scenarios and
semantic areas of the single predictions.
• Amplified optimism
• Scale extreme
• Adaptive emotion
• Simulation as game
• Evolvability
• Collaboration environment
• Reverse shortage

8. The design process
• All the predictions were recorded inside these 7 macro-ideas.
• Further on they were classified in 5 areas
– politics
– infrastructures
– environment
– economy
– Society
• and then clusters of the classified predictions were made inside
any of the 5 chosen fields (for example, in the Economy
area, predictions of „micro-philanthropy networks‟ and „seed
networking‟ were clustered under „solidarity networks‟)

9. The design process
• 2. arrange the discovered structure to achieve
one macro reading orientation.
• The 5 areas had different degree of abstraction
• i.e. the predictions of an area were more abstract than the
ones of another, so we have ordered them from the more
abstract (politics) to the less (society).

10. The design process

11. The design process
• Everything led to the narrative idea. We
thought about the story we wanted to tell, and to
do that we evoked a precise imagery:
– the idea came from the retro-futurism of „50s when
everything seemed possible and the consequences of
the smallest transformation were exaggerated on
purpose to open people‟s mind in wonder.

12. The project
• Basically the map is designed to overlap this
allegorical plan of illustration/collage to the
semantic level of the network of keywords on
top.
• But probably the most important result we
chased for the entire design process was to tell
a story made up of multiple tales and not to
convey one privileged solution to the audience,

13. The project
• in any way: the faraway viewpoint of the Map of
the Future communicates our distance from the
future and gives the observers a panorama.
• The aim of this map was to provide a starting
point, a common imaginary, to start discussion
and analysis on the world to come.

16. See full size photo