The Experiential Futures Ladder
Experiential futures design situations and stuff from the future to catalyse insight and change.
Most futures practices and writing centre on a high level of abstraction. Mostly narrative, diagrams, descriptions. Experiential futures explore more concrete manifestations of futures. In doing so, they give a tangible experience to interact with and a real feel for what that future implies.
To be effective, an experiential future does not create a moment or an artefact from a random future in isolation. Instead, the experience is deliberately oriented within a hierarchy of future details.
The Experiential Ladder is a tool invented by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan that aids designers in this orientation exercise.
To begin, a Setting is defined; this is type of future under exploration.
From this generic image of the future a Scenario is selected. This is a specific narrative and sequence of events.
Within this scenario, a Situation is explored. This situation details the circumstances in which we encounter this future. It’s the particular events that us as the audience will experience in physical form at 1:1 scale in various media.
Each of these rungs of the ladder, direct us toward the physical Stuff that we interact with.
These layers orient participants to the elements of the process that are fixed (e.g. broad theme, the location, and the timing). That foundation creates a shared understanding of the future, and a starting point from which to explore the experience.
By narrowing down the arena for creativity to the open questions of this future , attention can be directed to the experience at hand and away from the infinite, inconsistent possibilities of an untethered experience.
Sources
Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan