110 / Futures Thinking and UX Design, with Phil Balagtas

For more than a decade, Futures Design thinker Phil Balagtas has been developing tools for fusing the concepts of strategic foresight and speculative design with traditional design strategy. On June 22-23 at the ITX Product + Design Conference, he’ll share many of these insights. In a Day 1 workshop and Day 2 keynote, Phil will show us how we might envision our future, considering all those things that demand our attention: our users, our businesses and current strategies, and our impact on society – through the lens of design.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Phil describes his work to build and support a community of futures thinkers, insisting that the community formed through a series of ‘right time, right place’ events. Using terms like speculative design, strategic foresight, and traditional design strategy, he talks about how the power of community has been crucial to creating the momentum that drives innovation.

The futures design vocabulary avoids words like predict or forecast, instead preferring foresight and possibility to answer “what if?” types of scenarios, Phil explains. But the cool part is that this practice is not dissimilar from current business strategy approaches.

“We did similar things before, looking at alternate possibilities of the future,” he adds. “But now we have very rich visions and scenarios, and we use them to explore how we want to operate in that world, how we create innovations and pioneer new markets.

“We’re a future-minded species. Naturally, we’re always thinking of the future. ‘What if this happens? What do I do then?’ What I’m working on is a new set of tools that help us do what we’ve always done, now aiming them at business and product strategy applications.”

Listen to the entire pod – or check out the ITX Product + Design Conference – where you can learn more from Phil Balagtas about the fresh perspective futures thinking and speculative design bring to the conversation – issues that don’t always come to mind in traditional business methods, but are gaining importance every day.

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