Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. Today I’m joined by my usual co-host, Shruthi. Hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Hi everybody.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you for being with us and we are thrilled to have with us two visionaries in the realm of design research and foresight, Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova. Fabien and Nicolas are the founders of Girardin and Nova, a multidisciplinary agency addressing planetary matters with a very unique approach. They both have more than two decades of collaboration since their days at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, if I remember well, in Lausanne, you pioneered the practice of design fiction, a field for which you have published even a manual, as we can see, that covers its origin, the utility, the impact, and some of the key practices. Your work spans from advising clients worldwide to mentoring new generations of professionals, and so…

 

Thank you so much for coming with us today. Welcome Fabiana and Nicola.

 

Fabien Girardin 

Hello, thank you. Thanks for the introduction, Simone. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

 

Nicolas Nova

Hello, both of you. Good to be here as well.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you, both. So to kick off our conversation, I’d like to pose a little bit of an opening question. For as much as it sounds trite and basic, let’s say, it’s a must, I think, to approach such an innovative, is it, practice that is design fiction. So my question for you would be, what is design fiction exactly, both of you?

 

Fabien Girardin 

So, yeah, we’ve been practicing and developing the practice for the last 10 to 15 years. So it’s still, I think it’s still new to many, many people. There is kind of a formal definition of design fiction that is kind of the practice of creating evocative and tangible prototypes from possible new futures in order to discover the implications of decision making. So we need to, we need to a bit of unpack this rather academic definition, but the idea is, to merge different kinds of ways to explore the futures. One being through observations, local observations and understanding in our case, in the kind of the roots of design fiction is kind of the relation between technology and society.

 

There is also the understanding and the research of global trends, what is going on in that relationship. And the third way, probably the third ingredient that might be new in mixing the three together is the use of prototypes. It’s really like creating tangible objects that represents a potential future that tells stories about what might come in the future for an organization or group of people kind of to discuss and explore further.

 

Nicolas Nova 

And maybe if I can add something as a, I mean, as a follow up to what Fabien just said, one thing that is important for us when we use the term design is designing a prototype doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to create something shiny or something that refers to what people have in mind when we say design, like fancy furniture and fancy graphic design. It’s more about, in our case, it’s more about designing objects, which are very common, which are very mundane with what our former colleague Nick Foster called the future mundane. And to some extent, it’s a bit like when you see a science fiction movie, you can see props in the movie that, I mean, somehow help to tell a story about what the world would be in the future. So design fiction is to some extent, it’s a bit like creating those props, creating those objects without making the whole film, creating object that are mundane enough so that people can understand what it is about. But they are evocative about a potential future that can help grasp the consequences of things like, self-driving vehicles, AI or so, and the environmental crisis to some extent.

 

Fabien Girardin 

Maybe, maybe to give a kind of a practical example of this in fiction, is one of the classic work that we did in the past was to create the IKEA catalog of the future. And, and we used that catalog kind of to express what could be a future of connected objects and intelligent and smart objects in the future. So we just recreated a format that everybody understands to give an explanation of what is an IKEA catalog. And within the catalog, just slightly change some elements to project them into the future. So the whole format is totally understandable. But then we provoke the audience to connect new services, new products, new interactions, possible interactions that might come in the future.

 

So that’s one classic example that kind of defines what Nicolas was talking about, the mundane. IKEA is mundane, IKEA is a daily, it’s something that everybody’s aware of and understands.

 

Simone Cicero

So, since you practice this for ages now, and in the meantime, the feeling is that what once was considered as a future thing has very much come back into the next six months or one year.

 

So my point is really not to resonate with a quote from a friend of mine that I use very often in this podcast,  Thomas Diez once told me, future is a word of the past. So how has the design fiction changed and the practices that you use to kind of look into the future changed as the future has become much more near to us, know, to some extent we are living in the future already. So how are things, how have things changed in the last couple of decades in your practice as we have been living through this acceleration?

 

Fabien Girardin 

So maybe one thing is that there is design fiction and there are a whole spectrum of practices that speculate around the future, speculative design, critical design, and many, many others. So it sounds like we have been alone creating and exploring the future with these ingredients that we mentioned earlier in the definition, the mundane, the objects, the creation the way to create and make things to think. 

 

So that’s one thing. There are different ways of doing that and ours is one of them. And what I’ve seen also is that people just practice design fiction or speculative design without really knowing that they do that. Anybody who does like working backwards, like in an Amazon style, who kind of project themselves in the future, right? Write an FAQ, write a press release around the organization or product is doing some sort of design fiction. They create something to have a discussion. So it’s not like for me that we presented as such, but I’ve seen many, many people now using kind of our ingredients, thinking within the design fiction as part of their practice. So that’s one evolution that I’ve seen. 

 

And also for us, I think there was a, and probably Nicholas can, can, can tell and share his perspective. I’ve seen a lot of work around products and services around design fiction, kind of close to a user experience design, which is great, which is, which is fantastic. And for us, recently, I think there was a need to try to bring that practice into another terrain, another, another field and probably closer to understanding if we can prototype organizations and not only prototype a service and a product. So that’s kind of the evolution I’ve seen coming. I don’t know, Nicolas, if you want to add something to it.

 

Nicolas Nova 

There’s probably also something related to timeframes because in the previous company we had working with Julian Bleecker, we used the term near future, Near Future Laboratory. Near future was meant to focus in a three to five years in the future. it’s interesting that three to five years in the future is not big, but as organizations evolved in the last 10 to 15 years, we noticed that it’s already a lot a long time ahead, five to seven years. 

 

And there’s a need for a lot of organizations we work with to not necessarily to think about the distant future, but think about tomorrow or the coming year or month and get back to now, the present, the decisions that have to be taken in the present, basically. And our interest with design fiction is to find this kind of tool as a way to find some kind of balance between thinking about probably one, two, three years in the future, or maybe something a bit more distant, but certainly go back to now, to the present, and rethink the way organizations think about what they can do now. 

 

And it’s clear that it’s related with this trend, the fact that they don’t necessarily have much thinking ahead, but also about the fact that there are big changes coming up very frequently in terms of geopolitical crisis, environmental issues, not just technology. Probably at the beginning of this century, things were a bit more rosy and thinking about technology was one of the most important aspect. But we realized that it’s not the case anymore. are obviously other issues coming up quite quickly. So there’s a need also to rethink this time frame and go back to something a bit more closer to us.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

If I can, if I can jump in, right. just wanted to take maybe one step backward because I want to help our listeners sort of visualize this process a little bit better. So I want to understand in design fiction – What is a, let’s say if somebody comes to you, what is a general, let’s say tool set that’s followed maybe, is there a general tool set in which case is there a structure or a process that sort of sets it apart as well from other forecasting approaches? Maybe touching upon a bit on the methods in which somebody can deploy design fiction will be helpful as well.

 

Fabien Girardin

Sure so. We always in a book in a design fiction manual, mentioned like, it’s not really, we don’t show process. Like there is not a recipe to do that, but it’s more of a mindset within a manual. talk about the ingredients that make that practice kind of powerful. And so I cannot tell you like one story of how we engage with people in our organization. 

 

But more generally, I think that people they approach us with a concern and an unclear vision that not really sure what one type of an evolution means for them. So they need something that is relatable to them – what if AI changes the workplace practices? What does it mean for my whole organization, the way that we’re organized? 

 

So typically what we do is explore kind of that concern, that lack of vision. And we try to build a what if scenarios. So what if this technology changes your practice? What does it mean? What if you have to change your key performance indicators? What would they be? And so on and so on and so on. So we go through a kind of series of questions. And normally we kind of agree on a set of questions that then we explore through prototyping.

 

practically, tangibly, what would it mean to have that change, to have that evolution being technological, being environmental? What would they mean, again, for the specific organization, for the specific people that want us to explore? So we try to create something that is relatable, that people kind of understand, that goes beyond the report, but more like, yeah like a fictional service, a fictional event. And as you said, like recently a fictional organization, which is re rebuild the whole organization for the Department of Defense in Switzerland. That came with that question of understanding like what if people, Swiss from abroad could actually help the country in their defense and security? What would that mean? Practically, how would you do that?

 

And we just recreated our whole organization and then a fictional website that presents Swiss from abroad who organize and the kind of courses they have to go to, the kind of process they have to go, the onboarding process they have to go through, the technology they would use and so on and so on and so on. And by creating something like that, maybe it’s easier for the Department of Defense to of to have a, not a vision of what should happen, but more a vision of do, is this something that is desirable for us? What if we want to follow that path? What does it mean for us practically? And so, yeah, we are into that path. 

 

And normally we just create the first step in the path. We show the path, we create the first steps as a prototype, and it’s up to the organization or the people just to move further or not, or decide to stop the operation there.

 

Nicolas Nova

An important parameter maybe in what Fabien said is that we tend to choose what we call the design fiction archetype. Here it could be a website for an organization. But like Fabien mentioned also, the Ikea catalog of near future that we did with the near future about eight before. We had project with manuals. We had project with videos. And there could be many kind of formats. And the important thing is that we

 

Perhaps back to the question about the difference between other forecasting approaches is that we mix the prototyping, like materially creating like a catalog or a manual, with extrapolation. And it’s something that there is some kind of mutual relationship between the two. The fact that we choose, for instance, like a specific format for the scenario, leads us to select certain kind of signals about the future and turn them into something meaningful. And there is this kind of back and forth between the format and the ideas that makes us move forward with creating an object that would help people to think about consequences of something like AI or self-driving vehicles, for instance.

 

Simone Cicero 

I have a quick question that I perceive is important in your work. When you make the point that you approach this exercise of building futures in a diegetic way, I think it’s in English, I don’t know how to pronounce it, a traditional more mimetic way, what does it mean? 

 

My impression is when I was reading in the book, is that you tend to build some kind of, how can I say, a story that is not centered on the people that are looking to tell the story, but more of a world perspective, like a perspective of trying to represent change in a more systemic way, but maybe my perception. So in general, can you clarify a bit what you mean with being diagetic in the process?

 

Nicolas Nova 

Maybe it’s like it’s typically it’s a kind of academic term that makes us look super smart. We used I mean, we took that term from from a researcher in science and communication studies from called David Kirby, the term diegetic prototype. It’s he wrote a very interesting book about the relationship between science and cinema and movie production and and the term diegetic prototype in his work. It’s just a way to capture how objects, products, technologies that are featured in movies somehow generate a certain kind of plot. Like if you look, for instance, at an episode of Black Mirror or even Star Wars, you see in the movie certain artifacts. And these artifacts lead you as a spectator, as a viewer, to think about the possibilities. You think that you are in a world in which you have this kind of tool, this kind of artifacts. And that’s similar with design fiction, this idea that by creating an object that is evocative enough, you will make people understand that it has consequences. So instead of saying self-driving vehicles will do this or that, for a lot of people, this is super abstract. They don’t even know what this is about. You create a map of Geneva, for self-driving vehicles. That’s a project we did a few years ago. And by doing this, you create something that is meaningful, relevant, evocative enough, and very tangible for people to understand that this technology will have an influence on the way the roads, the streets are structured, and this might have consequences for me living in this neighborhood, et cetera, et. So digest this here. It’s just the idea of generating a story or suggesting a certain kind of story by creating object that make people understand that the world would be different somehow. 

 

Shruthi Prakash 

What are the kind of maybe use cases that you see that are implementing design fiction and from a lens that what motivates people, is there any significant competitive advantage maybe that they can build through adopting these mechanisms?

 

Fabien Girardin 

So, yeah, there are a few reasons why we do, you would use this in fiction. I’m going to give you one example of me working within an organization. At some point, a few years ago, I worked with one of our clients that was a major bank here in Spain. And I entered into their, the team of data scientists. As I am one of them, as a data scientist, I can do design fiction. And I really use as the co-director of that department. And I use design fiction to give a voice to our data scientists and help communicate the kind of capabilities that they had and translate them into a language that the rest of the organization would understand. 

 

So typically as a data scientist, you would kind of show your algorithms and demo and show wonders. But many times it misses the step of saying, what does it mean for the rest of the organization? So we would create with my team and also with the help of a designer fictional advertisements and little videos explaining how we think our capabilities could transform the whole bank. And so we’ll use a little of like a small, small video, small advertisement that we would put on a wall or share across the organization using our presentations. And I think that was kind of a powerful way to give a voice to people who don’t normally have that voice. so Design Fiction, we kind of powerful to do that. That’s one example of why would you approach that. Beyond the other example I gave of being like, not being able to set a clear vision, not being able to understand like the blind spots. Sometimes people approach us and just to have for us to give them the unexpected. 

 

They know kind of what’s on the road for them in their, in their industry. things have been written, they’ve been discussed for a lot, but they need kind of a kind of a side perspective. And that’s where we come in and that’s where we, we use our, our prototypes and fiction just to, shake things up a little bit. not to make people afraid of the future, but just to, you have actually to feel more certain, certain that – look, that’s what’s on the path or potential path that might come to us.

 

Simone Cicero 

I know I was talking to Shruthi  in the background and we were exchanging around the idea that it seems like that a process like this is enacted often by an approach rather than a process. It’s enacted by highly designed forward and conscious people, conscious of the potential benefits that in general, design thinking can have and design fiction can bring to the organization. 

 

So it sounds very much of a process that would be typically enacted in very, again, very conscious organizations with leaders that have lot of money to spend and lots of conviction that this brings benefit to the organization. 

 

So my question for you would be now to clarify if possible how do you and if this is possible how do you operationalize this capability inside the organization in teams, right? And what would be the case for it? So do you see a case for organizations to develop a more practical design fiction or this type of capabilities in the in their ordinary life. So it can be operationalized in a way inside an organization as a capability or it’s something that remains at a very high level like board levels or design community or something more specific.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

I was just asking this also because you use the word mundane to describe the product. So I’m just curious why you use that word here.

 

Fabien Girardin 

You want to jump on the mundane and then maybe I answer to Simone.

 

Nicolas Nova 

Yeah, well, mean, the term mundane, it looks funny when we think about innovation and futures thinking, because it looks almost boring. For us, you have to keep in mind that what we are aiming for, what we are interested in is to make potential scenarios for the future legible, understandable. And in order to do this, we need to find ways of making those design fiction prototypes evocative enough so that people understand that self-driving vehicles may have an influence on urban traffic. We need to show how environmental catastrophes might lead organizations to have a different practice. So in order to make those changes understandable, we need to find formats, what I call design fiction archetypes a few minutes ago. Find design fiction archetypes and formats which are understandable.

 

The way we found that understandable was to use mundane object from our daily life. Like if we take the IKEA catalog, that’s a mundane object because almost everyone knows what it is about, what it is made of, what’s the format, what kind of content you find in it. And by using this very banal, very mundane kind of format, you can convey a certain number of things about very abstract and very complex issues such as, AI, data collection systems, recommendation engines, or environmental issues, but turning them with a visual and textual vocabulary that sits in the mundane. I mean, that is understandable. 

 

Nick Foster created this very interesting example of future mundane by creating a cereal box to show the future of food in the shape of a cereal box. Because using a cereal box, you can show very complex ingredients, literally ingredients like GMOs or insect proteins turn into cereals. So all those ingredients can, which are complex. You can find them in very, very complex reports, R &D documents, academic papers, but turning them into something that exists in a mundane object is a way to make that change is understandable. 

 

So that’s and for us, it’s also an interesting paradox because having a conversation about something abstract by using something mundane to create this kind of discrepancy or maybe paradox. But that’s a way to engage with people, they working in large organizations or being a layman, a laywoman. So that’s a way to make the future graspable, evocative, and understandable.

 

Fabien Girardin 

So maybe to answer Simone’s question, one thing I would argue is not that, first of all, money is not the issue in the organization. And I would argue that design fiction is actually quite, it’s a cheap way. It’s powerful, yet cheaper. It’s cheaper now to prototype. Cheaper than five years ago, it’s cheaper than 10 years ago. And it would probably be cheaper in five years.

 

So there’s one thing that you can actually prototype more quickly and more effectively now. And, and, and I think the key resource that is missing is time within the organization. 

 

And I think people approaching us, they, they lack time. She able to be able to, to reflect on what’s coming to be able to elaborate on what’s coming, explore potential implications of what they are building. 

 

And so to make that more practical within an organization, what I find is that you have to design fiction like, almost like as you go to the gym. It’s not like you have to do like a retreat once a year and the whole board and or executives are going to think about the future and they’re going to use design fiction. The more effective way is more like to take that as part of the activities and parts of the thinking that organization has to do. 

 

And it can go in many different levels of the organization being executive or also being, in my case, working with data scientists. Just like take one day a month, one afternoon a week, just to reflect and to think differently. Question your assumptions of what you’re trying to build, what you’re trying to do.

 

And you can use design fiction to do that, but it’s like more like you have to train yourself. obviously people around you can kind of in the urgency that there are, that there is in many, many organizations right now, like find that that moment where you can do, create another perspective. And that makes your, your team organization way more richer or stronger.

 

Simone Cicero

Can I ask you, what do you feel is the hardest part? Is it harder for people in organizations to really paint these future scenarios or is it more difficult that they paint scenarios in a way that they are systemic and aware of the implications, know, so maybe, you my perception is that sometimes companies tend to think about the future in a way that is like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? And I think that your practice is rather going in another direction. It’s more like trying to look at the evolution of, you know, kind of future of everything that includes and, you know, contains our products. organizations and so on. 

 

So what is the hardest thing to do for them to be really systemic in their thinking or really think about the future in such a fast-evolving world?

 

Fabien Girardin

Maybe I can start from my perspective. I don’t think it’s a problem to be systemic. think that the people we collaborate with, work with, they’re very good at it. I think there is bit of a, sometimes they stuck the imagination, stuck in their daily life, stuck at the present, which is understandable because we live in a fast world and there’s a high pressure and you have to request to the next quarter. The next quarter really matters and to go beyond that is already an extra effort. And I think it’s in that part of that extra effort if you don’t practice that usually again, like it kind of you kind of lose that capacity so we work with brilliant people who are really good at systematic thinking and understanding their future.

 

They kind of understand, but they lack sometimes the kind of the practice or the creativity around what could be something that is not linear or exponential. Like show us something that is different. That’s where I think we bring and design fiction brings provides the space, the safe space for people to try different things with their imagination.

 

Nicolas Nova 

And probably as well, mean, it might be also because of the different skill sets we have, Fabia and myself, but bringing a perspective coming from the social sciences and the humanities, like for instance, anthropology, history, the way ideas have evolved over time, the way people think that evolved over time and in different cultures, is also important.

 

In general, the way forecast and foresight scenarios, methods are done in a quite rigorous and systematic way. It’s interesting, it lacks sometimes this kind of creative vibe that Fabien mentioned, but also thinking about the complexity of the world. And here, I mean, as you can see from our faces, it will not like the most diverse team.

 

So that it’s important in the context of project to work with people who can have a totally different perspectives working with like – We have a colleague Istra working as a former student of mine working in Mexico And and and working with people from different parts of the world. It’s also different cultures It’s it’s and younger also different genders. It’s also important as a way to contrast our perspective even if they could be creative or fed by social sciences and humanities, but contrast our perspective with different ways of thinking in different contexts. And that for, I mean, for us, I think it’s super important because otherwise you might end up into like the business as usual kind of scenarios that would not be relevant for the client we work with.

 

Shruthi Prakash

I mean, for me, this is really interesting because I also sort of really like the overlaps between different sectors that can happen. for me, I’m curious to understand, let’s say, is this a co-creative process in any sense that there are different kinds of participants who are involved, like you said, like maybe in terms of like culture and so on, but also within the organization, right? 

 

Like who are the participants who is contributing in this process of design fiction. And one more sort of lead or tangent that we had is have you sort of also explored integrating AI in your design fiction process so that it maybe help speed up future predictions or like help with understanding the overlaps a lot better.

 

Fabien Girardin

Maybe I can answer to the later question first, because that’s definitely for us, AI is a way not to do the research or as a way of, for instance, to get like first set of inspirations, because eventually in fiction, there’s a lot of creativity involved. 

 

And I think current tools are a way to kind of provoke the answers that we can receive, kind of provoke the imagination. And the same way that probably we can do that with, with, with clients. And I think that, so it kind of, it became kind of a daily use of, these tools is a, is a way to kind of start thinking as a way to contrast thinking.

 

The way in terms of prototyping, it’s faster to prototype because the tools kind of, they give you the code, they give you a piece of text that you can use as kind of a placeholder from the future. And practically, for instance, we did recently a work of creating a research article from the future, kind of what if we explored a specific question.

 

What would that mean? And the way we did it is to start with the end, to write the article, the academic article that will be published. And I gave a kind of our description of the research question that we had and the experiment that we had in mind to Chat GPT that produced the abstract. And within the abstract, it came with the results, results of percentage of blah, blah,

 

And it’s not like the person is so important, but it’s part of the story that we want to tell that is about experiments and about generating knowledge that that was what is important to communicate to the client as part of that research. But it really helps kind of tell the story without us having to really go into the details of doing that. So that it’s not that important that kind of world building elements that the AI did there was not that important for our job. It’s not the core, but it really helps in telling the whole story and to send kind of the message to the client. And I don’t know for, maybe, on the first question was kind of a, is the, the audience or what are the people we.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Yeah, who are the participants and is there like co-creation in the process maybe from like even customers, right? Like is there, who are the people involved in this process?

 

Fabien Girardin

So yeah, probably Nicola will be able to kind of expand on what they say. again, like, I don’t think there is kind of one way of dealing with that because as I was mentioning, sometimes we work with one person, meaning like that’s the contact person. Typically at the Department of Defense in Switzerland, they have a foresight group and we have one contact person there. And we really kind of co-create the future with that person having conversations. We take the lead. Normally we kind of show pitch, explore futures, and then have a conversation of having feedback and conversation about this mean. And we go and we move, we move further and we move and we further explore. 

 

And then whatever material we produce, then is shared within the smaller group of the four type foresight team. then within events from Department of Defense. So it’s kind of, you can expect that whatever we share has an impact also in a larger edition because we have a conversations around the prototype that we could share. So again, like we co-created some level, but at the kind of a small scale in that case, but also co-create at a larger scale because what we want with this kind of work and prototype is to be able to share them to spread the conversation, share the vision, the potential, the implications, the issues.

 

Nicolas Nova

But sometimes it can go closer to the real co-creation with larger groups of people. I’m sitting here in a museum in Geneva because I just had a meeting about an exhibit we are working on about the future. And for this, we’ll work with a class of young students, like 12 years old. Yeah, the discussion was about the activities we can ask them to do and probably will lead to choosing a certain design fiction format, certain topic. The point is not necessarily, like in this case, it’s more to show them the design fiction approach and let them think about potential object that would be evocative enough about the future. And it’s the first time we’re doing that with kids. So I’m quite curious to see how co-creation happens with this kind of audience. And at the same time, I’m quite intrigued because most of them are coming from different countries. 

 

This is Geneva and lot of migration. So it’s going to be both challenging and inspiring to see what they have in mind and how prototyping an actual object would lead them to think about the future. So that’s proper co-creation. But it depends, as Fabien said, it’s totally depending on context with clients, clients’ expectations, budgets, and the possibility to work with end users, customers, or only people inside the company.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

I was just going to say that I’m assuming kids will be less dystopian about the future than we will be.

 

Nicolas Nova

Well, mean, that you never know. And that’s one other thing I’m curious about, like to see what they think in terms of connotations about the future.

 

Simone Cicero

I think we touched upon a few fascinating points. So first, when we said this needs to be a muscle that you build in an organization. So it’s the typical thing that I would not maybe connect with a unit or a capability in the organization, consider the Harward Design Fiction team or something like that, but rather set of way of thinking and tools and practices that everybody can use, more of a community of practice maybe or something like that. 

 

And certainly I think that this idea of building a muscle through a rhythm of imagining the future as a way to drive our strategy, products, or also organizational development energies, let’s say.

 

I think it makes a lot of sense to me. So sometimes you in organizations, you end up being caught in the day to day and you don’t really build this muscle of imagining the future. And, maybe you have these occasional workshops when you play, remember the future a couple of times, but you don’t have this structure a way to imagine, you know, the system, how it works in parallel with your organization and your products. And then reconnecting these with your strategy basically. So I think this makes a lot of sense. 

 

And another very important and interesting point I think we made on AI because, for example, episodes a few weeks ago, had Philippe De Ridder on the podcast from Boards of Innovation and he was talking about how they’re using AI to play the customer role in interviews. For example, in doing customer insights. 

 

And I think, I feel like AI could be a very good way to you know, the LLMs can be a very good way to, first of all, interrogate the future and they are much better than us in keeping the big picture, you know, just for the nature they have. They have to keep everything into the answers in the background. So I think these are two very interesting points that may be useful for everybody that is listening to this podcast. 

 

So first, build the muscle, create the competencies and then use AI because AI is going to give you lot of capabilities that you may not have otherwise in terms of research. The equivalent of research you have to build up to represent a credible future in your exercise. 

 

Does it make sense or am I climbing in mirrors?

 

Fabien Girardin

No, I think it totally makes sense. One on what you mentioned around the community of practice. But I think for us, we think like there’s a, it’s a mindset. There’s a design fiction mindset. So you need to, it’s not like you need to have a process and you have a specific team doing that. I think there are some elements that people have to understand and have the time kind of to practice to, to create something different from the future as part of their work. again, it can go in any level. 

 

And so it’s really for us, I’ve seen, it’s part of the culture, more of the organization and the mindset of people that we think that is kind of, you can change, you can evolve into that direction. 

 

And the other point is, I have another example with the use of AI and recently we created a prototype that involves a lot of writing. So we could actually upload that kind of that prototype into a notebook ML that produces podcasts, produces a short competition, Simone and Shruthi. It’s a 15 minute podcast around a fiction that could create it. And it was fascinating to listen to the conversation of journalists kind of dissecting our prototype and questioning it. I think it was the first time that we could see like AI being acting as the audience of our prototype. And it’s a way to simulate and also to explore what you’re doing. It’s pretty amazing to be able to do that. Obviously, it’s an extra set. It’s an extra way of doing things that is really interesting and I think enriching in that.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right, mean, of course, know, a big topic of this season seems to be that AI really, and LLM really become usable tools that can really shortcut a lot of work that we used to make and we used to do and be very powerful in shortening the research cycles and in general, giving our organizations faster ways of thinking. So I think that resonates. 

 

So maybe as a kind of a closing question, closing topic before we move to the actual closing, I’d like to ask you, since we started this conversation saying, you know, the future is a world of the past, everything has changed in the last 30 years. So where are you going with your work? How are things kind of evolving from pure, you know, design fiction as a topic into your whole practice, what are the directions that you believe are important to keep an eye on as designers, entrepreneurs, organizations. So what’s new on the table?

 

Fabien Girardin

so for me, it’s there are many, many opportunities to experiment. Again, like using AI is, is those are fascinating tools to be able to explore new experiences or to better understand, some of the questions I think about Nicholas and myself, what we, what we are really interested in is to generate knowledge in general.

 

The work that we do doesn’t generate solutions, or we don’t work on trying to solve a problem, but more on keeping exploring and generating knowledge. So definitely recently with the generative AI, there is an interesting domain to explore on how we generate knowledge with these tools, with their limitations. So that’s definitely a way of for me to keep on experimenting. I keep my hands dirty. That’s how I kind of like to have my brain fresh and also trying to involve as many like younger, the younger generation as possible into our work. 

 

Both of us, we teach and I think it’s an important ingredient to keep fresh and the mind fresh. so yeah, that’s the kind of things that I’m doing on a daily basis.

 

Nicolas Nova 

On my side, one thing that I realized working in design context and design fiction is that it’s one thing to speculate, it’s another thing to be aware of changes. In the book about design fiction, in the manual, there’s this part about faint signal, finding patterns of changes, et cetera, et cetera. And one other thing that I’m interested in, especially teaching in an art and design school, but also engineering school and social scientists is to teach observation. What does it mean to observe changes about technologies, about environmental changes, about social practices, et cetera, et cetera? And that’s something you can observe directly. You can interview people. You can read certain kind of documents, reports, et cetera, et cetera.

 

And that’s also a kind of message that needs to be trained. Paying attention to change and paying attention to small kind of changes or bigger kind of changes, that’s a skill. And that’s something that does not happen overnight by reading a book. So yeah, that’s really something that keeps me working and trying to think about assignments, training programs, activities to help people with that and use that kind of material later on for design activities and design fiction, of course.

 

Simone Cicero 

So, staying on top of the observation capabilities of being able to capture what’s happening, at least developing this attention, I think is really crucial because again, as I said before, companies and organizations tend to be so much focused on the daily process that they forget that the world actually exists, even if it’s harder and harder nowadays because of all the changes we are going through.

 

So before we move into the closing, you have any breadcrumbs to share with our listeners? So when we say breadcrumbs, we normally mean, as you know, things that we want to suggest our readers to catch up with, with regards to the science fiction practice, but more in general, I mean, the important things that you want to share with the audience.

 

Fabien Girardin

Nicolas, you can go through all your open tabs. I’m sure there are many. Just maybe, is very good at giving very good references. Maybe one on my side is the work of Ethan Mollick around co-intelligence. is, it’s more an academic work on artificial intelligence, but it’s very, very accessible to a large audience. 

 

And I think his latest book is very good and also a newsletter is kind of eye-opening and there’s so much noise currently. And I think part of our job is to give more signal to the noise. And I think that Mollick tries to do that.

 

Nicolas Nova 

Another recommendation on my end is Patrick Tanguay, Canadian living in Montreal. And he has a newsletter called Sentier Media. I can probably send you the link afterwards. And it’s some kind of compilation of different leaks and comments about those links. That’s the usual kind of format. 

 

Another recommendation is J. Springett, the JayMo – very interesting observer of world building, I mean, different experiments with taking notes, with solo punk, which is this science fiction trend. And I have to say that, I mean, in terms of breadcrumbs, I follow a lot of artists on Instagram, mostly because I feel like artists’ work could be not necessarily prediction about the future, but potential ideas about changes.

 

Like for instance, looking at the world by this British artist called Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is interesting to think about biotechnologies, for instance. There is Sofia Crespo, an artist who’s creating like artificial creatures and their look. I mean, all those things I find that stimulating as a way to, I mean, it’s close to what I mentioned about archetypes. There are different ways of thinking about the future – we do design fiction, for instance, but other people do newsletters, produce artwork with visuals. And all those things can be ways of thinking about changes ahead.

 

Shruthi Prakash

That sounds extremely interesting. Just from my side, thank you again. And I’m curious to see how like the generating knowledge space works even better as we go ahead, right? Like I’m super excited for it. And especially in a sort of attention deficient market, I think I’m super curious to know how that knowledge can be sort of unfortunately or fortunately, bite sized, I guess. So I’m curious to sort of see that happen.

 

And yeah, thank you. Maybe I’ll pass it on to Simone.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, in general, think for me, this conversation was really kind of eye-opening because for a person like me that fails continuously to think about the future, you know, I never stop basically to really think about what’s going on, how should influence my choices and I’m a bit of an intuitive person so I don’t really kind plan or project myself into the future.

 

I think that muscle, it’s even more atrophic in organizations, right? Maybe the typical large organization sits down every five years and kind of tries to imagine the future in these kind of events or happenings. But that’s, from what I bring home from the conversation today, that’s not really the way to go. It should be much more like a diffuse capability. Maybe the organization needs to work on enabling these practices, moments, mindsets, emotional capabilities to drip into the organization and really be practiced daily. 

 

And I think this is really, important. Again, we said something important that AI and LLMs are really powerful in enabling people to go through this. So what I can say is that to people, should be looking into the Design Fiction Manual.

 

Because, again, this is something you can do as an organization, as a team, and the manual can help in getting started. Of course, if you have more complex endeavors, you can reach out to Fabian and Nicolas and work together on imagining your future and enacting the changes in products you build and what organizations you build. So I think it was a very enriching conversation for me. I hope you also enjoyed both of you.

 

Fabien Girardin 

Thanks a lot. Thanks Simone. Thanks Shruthi.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you so much.

 

Nicolas Nova

Thanks for your interest. Thanks for your interest.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank so much. It was about time to discuss this topic on the podcast after five seasons and now six. So thank you for joining us. And for our listeners, of course, you will find all the interesting links and references that our guests today have shared in our website, www.boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. will find the episode, the transcript and all the references. And until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.