How To Play Small Solutions
This is a creation game based on speculation about possible futures.
Players come up with ideas for new apps and products while considering
different audiences, timelines, topics, objects and accessibility needs.
How to Play
Click the cards above to flip them and then use all four cards together as a design prompt to develop an application.
In a group of 3-6 players, with each player taking a 2-minute turn:
- The player whose turn it is turns over the cards
- Everyone in the group takes 2 minutes and writes up an app idea that matches the prompts
- After 2 minutes, the group presents and discusses their ideas, and pass them to the main player
- Play concludes when every player has had a turn and collected ideas from their group
- The group should now have a diverse array of apps and possible future scenarios to choose from
What each card does
-
Pick a timeline ranging from an optimistic future to a
dystopian one - from a few years ahead to 60 years in the future
-
Select a topic that often involves public debate and
regulation, like healthcare, transportation, governance etc.
-
Come up with a physical object that could be the site of some of those changes
-
Choose an audience from the list of demographics and groups
-
Consider some limitations that your audience
might face - these are accessibility categories used for this work by the designers of the Ontario Digital Service
-
Use these elements to imagine an app that could serve your chosen
audience at that point in the future, overcoming limitations and
challenges related to the topic
-
Describe your speculative future app and how it aims to responsibly
manage information to benefit its users
Get creative and see what ideas you can come up with! The goal is to
think about potential futures and how apps and information technology
might evolve to play constructive roles.
Below is a sample app to help spark your
imagination...
Sample Prompt and App
Timeline: 60 years in the future / When your kids have kids
Object: Instrument
Topic: Local Fauna
Audience: People older than 65 - so, people who are 5 today!
Limitation: Fatigue
Nature Echo
An app and handheld acoustic sensor device that allows elderly users - you! - to
passively monitor local wildlife activity from home, without physical
exertion.
The app connects to an acoustic recorder instrument mounted outside the
user's residence. Embedded AI analyzes recordings in real-time,
identifying animal sounds and songs in the area.
It translates these into a visualized soundscape and gentle notification
chimes simulated inside the home. Recreating the experience of wildlife
audibly and visually manifesting around them, without needing to venture
far outdoors.
By requiring only passive listening, the app overcomes mobility/fatigue
limitations to virtually transport nature to tech-savvy seniors through
ambient instruments. Keeping them connected to local fauna activity
patterns and changes occurring in their lifetime and beyond.
A Short Essay About Speculative Designs
, c. 2024, University of Maryland
Small Solutions is a game based on The Thing From The Future, a speculative design game by Stuart Candy and the late, great Jeff Watson. It has been expanded and changed to reflect readings in the class I teach, Interaction Design, which is less interested in the future than in the now that lasts forever. In 2014*, speculative design was having a real Moment - we had Dunne-Raby's work on speculative everything, Thomas Thwaites' Toaster Project, and a lot of work with DIY. In the years since, it has become increasingly difficult to picture a future where small optimisms can crush large collapses - and Thing From The Future in my classrooms reflects that.
Since it's a class on interactions and app design, the futures on offer are constrained to the screen. Since it's a professional development class, they're constrained to the imagination of the students playing - but more importantly, since the game was popular, the world's had the shutdowns Dunne-Raby couldn't picture happening in Speculative Everything. I have never run a game of Thing From The Future in my classes in the DMV where students didn't independently invent waterboarding, credit scores worse than those we already face, or cars that are just more difficult versions of the cars that currently kill people in testing.
This game is fun but how do we play it using the principles we see in design museums: accessible public services, better care for disabled people, etc. This game tends to generate juiceros! I would prefer it generate ideas about how to improve one's home without shopping.
Put simply, being cheerfully optimistic is a context-dependent utopia. The tool can be great, but like the two marshmallows, it relies on the students having a future they can picture that's good, and right now, ten years later, that is hard to perceive.
Therefore, I have written this web-based version of the game for a different future, based not only on the speculative works of Dunne-Raby and Situation Lab, but also the narrow but real change brought about by design professors at Olin College.
This game is intended to be played after reading Sara Hendren's essay "Limb," from her excellent book "What Can A Body Do? How We Meet The Built World." It is intended to let students consider small-scale interventions on their way to bigger lives.
Special thanks to Robot of RobotHugs and the members of the Hideaway for development and support of this project