tl;dr: Find unusual approaches to explore this familiar design space, brainstorm possible connected scenarios, and propose a visionary scenario.

• Deliverable a) Design Explorations - at least five-to-ten defamiliarized design explorations.

Due: Thursday, April 5

So now you’ve got a handle on the now. It’s time to move the needle and prospective five to 10 years out. The challenge is we’re designing for an eminently familiar space which is well explored and speculated on in terms of IoT solutions. This means it’s coming with a lot of design baggage…

and… often our design methods are designed to work up-close to current problems. They’re problem-centered and grounded in the things we know about today: we find problems and then we fix them through a new product. That means we don’t really innovate, we increment.

Fun! Thinking back a few weeks, we explored ideas around defamiliarization and the design of domestic technology. Dourish and Bell note how familiar spaces are often hard to design for; so you need to ‘make them strange’ to see the wood for the trees - either by using narratives, design fictions, speculating, or other design methods to recontextualize the space and allow you to really see what’s going on as well as strip away assumptions we might hold etc. etc.

So now we need to see neighborhood-focused technology through an atypical lens; make it strange and design for that strangeness. Let’s use design exercises focused on speculation to develop a vision which might spot disruptive thinking.

The Vision/Team lead should work to develop a design exercise that all team members can participate in and which leads to a vision for 5-10 years out.

You could simply say ‘Sketch a connected sidewalk/security system/voting booth of the future’

but some better possible options to spot opportunities might be:

Time shift:

• Imagine your son or daughter is moving to a modern urban neighborhood. What is their experience like??

• You’ve just invented time travel, you leap forward into the year 2031 and land right in the middle of Shadyside. What is strange and different about this neighborhood?

Place shift:

• Design your neighborhood on mars / underwater / etc.

Persona shift:

• Design for an extreme persona e.g. Design the connected neighborhood of tomorrow for the an ultra-athlete / a YouTube superstar / etc.

Or you could repeat the design exercises from previous weeks to rapidly generate a set of potential ideas to explore.

Discuss the outcomes. Explore speculative, outlandish ideas as design opportunities. Then and only then return to the pragmatic and work towards a proposal for your group.