Client
Bigwidesky
Services
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Futures literacy
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Interactive webinar series
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Foresight starter kit
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Speculative design artifacts
Human+ 2050
Question
What does the future of business and technology look like in 2050?
Method
Bigwidesky, a communication and foresight consultancy, wanted to guide community members in leveraging speculative design as a tool for strategic foresight. Through a three-part, interactive webinar series, community members 1) learned about strategic foresight and speculative design, and 2) co-designed artifacts 25 years into the future.
The educational workshop produced the Human+ 2050 product catalog, featuring three artifacts imagined, researched, and designed by community participants:
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Projectus: An AI-generated, multi-sensory playback allowing users to experience life through the eyes of an ancestor.
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Infinifit: A backpack portaling users to an undersea storage vault.
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X-Timeless: A watch advising users on how to maximize each moment, based on four data factors (creativity, history, health, and chance).
Results
What they asked for
A community workshop educating participants on the strategic foresight and speculative design process.
What they gained
The tools necessary for participants to lead the workshop themselves—producing tangible deliverables they designed, researched, and imagined.
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Community-designed speculative artifacts.
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Futures webinars for their community and clients.
1
A report on the participatory foresight experience.
How might we identify potential consumer preferences in 2050 using community-driven design processes?
Bigwidesky, a communication and foresight consultancy, wanted to help their community explore speculative design as a tool for strategic foresight. We collaborated on a five-month engagement to host a community-driven, three-part interactive webinar series focused on futures literacy and speculative design. The series introduced Bigwidesky’s five-step foresight process—probleming, researching, imagining, gathering insights, and strategizing—while guiding participants in co-designing artifacts and products from 2050. Deliverables included speculative design artifacts, narratives, and a takeaway futures starter kit.
Between sessions, our team conducted sociocultural research to refine the community’s speculative concepts, ultimately producing the Human+ 2050 product catalog featuring three finalized, future-forward artifacts. Visual renders and narratives brought these artifacts to life, immersing participants in a plausible 2050 future and demonstrating how speculative design can inform business strategy. This project exemplified participatory futures literacy, with each artifact grounded in sociocultural signals of change and shaped by the collective imagination of Bigwidesky’s community.