Strategic foresight and design fiction workshops.

A design fiction makes a future concrete: a newspaper, a manual, a product catalogue or something someone would encounter in daily life. We work backwards from that object to the changes and choices that could make it ordinary.

Then your team takes its own subject beyond the first obvious answer. Who would adopt this? What would they gain? What would they have to give up? The scenario develops through those decisions, with its assumptions open to question.

Teams take the roles of different organisations, develop their responses and discover how their ideas collide. Then they change roles and go again. Customers, competitors, institutions and the public have their own motives and limits.

A workshop can combine making the world in the morning with playing its competing interests in the afternoon. You finish with design fictions from one possible world and a map of the relationships and consequences that emerged.

Bring a technology, a policy problem, a body of research or a decision your team is facing. We agree the scope, preparation and output before the session. I can also work inside an existing consultancy or foresight process, alongside your research and specialists.

At Dstl, I co-developed and taught foresight methods and designed and facilitated strategic games for government and NATO audiences. My approach also draws on quantitative modelling, finance and documentary work: the rules, the incentives and the people living with the consequences.

The futures on this site are public explorations of how I think. Browse a world, follow the changes that make it possible, and bring the questions it raises. For a film, television or game project, the Writers’ Room offers a dedicated route into worldbuilding and story development.