As we near 100 episodes, I wanted to fill you in on the SUPER cool project I have been invited to join, provide some education on what speculative design is and how we can use it for the events industry, and talk about our MBECS shift from the podcast to the video series!
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As we near 100 episodes, I wanted to fill you in on the SUPER cool project I have been invited to join, provide some education on what speculative design is and how we can use it for the events industry, and talk about our MBECS shift from the podcast to the video series!
We would love to hear from you! Please stay in touch with us through one of our many platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Website, and Email!
Hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back to another amazing podcast episode, trying really hard to not say hello, hello my friends, just like it's so natural, that's what I want to be saying. I have had a lot going on in the last two weeks and I want to share a little bit of updates about the podcast and the future of the podcast and the video series. And I have a super exciting topic to talk about today and this cool project that I was asked to be on.
I do want to start off today's episode by acknowledging the war that's going on right now. Russia invading the Ukraine. I have a lot of friends and colleagues and faculty friends that are in the Ukraine. I've spoken at the American University in Sumy before. I have a lot of Facebook friends in the Ukraine and I know that I'm following up with all of you on Facebook, but I just want to spend a minute on the podcast to tell you that I am thinking of all of you, the world is thinking of all of you, please stay safe. We care about you. We're checking in on you. And the world is watching. I don’t want to spend the whole episode on the war though honestly I could - events in wartime scenarios. There's already a lot that's going on with sponsorships and titles from mainly sporting events, events that have banned Russian delegates. There's a whole entire series that can be done about events and war. But I don't think that that would be very respectful to the situation currently. Maybe that can be on a future episode.
All right. So some updates on the podcast. So I was really excited about doing the MBECs series that I was talking about. And my intern Kenzie, she came up to me and said, Dr. K I really think that the MBECs should be focused on a video series because I think it will really help people studying for the CMP, it will really help the students in the classroom, faculty members can pull in these videos, and she made a strong solid case for why the MBECs should be for the video series, and that the podcast should stay on current events. And she came to me with a well thought out arguments and I agreed with her and so now the MBECs is going to go into the video series. We've already done several of them and we'll be posting them soon. We're kind of editing them along and I will announce on the podcast when those are up and when those are updated. Right now, I'm aiming to do two a week and holding myself accountable will be really good.
All right. Today, our podcast I am so excited about this topic. So the podcast is listened to all over the world. Thank you all so much for listening. It's in like over 50 countries right now have been represented and someone reached out and said Kristin I really love the podcast. I think you're very futuristic and you have a good vision and we want to invite you to kind of join in on this project. I’m like what project, right? And they're like, Have you ever heard of speculative design? I’m like no, I haven't.
I got on a call with them and they were talking about how, obviously traditionally throughout history, we focused a lot on product design. Okay, here is the purpose of this product, how can you design the product to meet this purpose? And then we've shifted into an era of human centered design and this is focused on the humans that are currently using the design. Of course, it's concerned with commercial and marketing activities. In technology that's available currently or technologies that we can foresee in the short term future. Human centered design is really where we're at right now. There are still organizations and companies using more of that traditional design but pretty much everybody is now focused on human centered work, some people call it user centered design, especially in tech.
I use human centered design all the time. I design my classrooms around the students that are in there. I design events around the attendees that will be attending the event, and totally my wheelhouse. Love human centered design. So this person who approached me said, Well, we're getting a small group together to talk about speculative design. Speculative design is really zooming out beyond the human centered design, and asking larger questions. What are the effects of our designs on future societies? It's not problem solving or prototyping. And to be very clear, even though it's looking at the future, it's not trying to predict the future. It's not forecasting. And it's not just pure criticism. It's really concerned with possibilities, kind of massive groupthink about all the different scenarios. So using that design thinking framework to come up with all the possible scenarios that could happen in the future. And then there is kind of a ranking system into possible, plausible, probable. Then we kind of consider our preferences and work our way there. So if we are looking at it overall, so speculative design in and of itself, isn't about working our way there that would be strategy for these internal companies. Anyways, I digress. This is speculative design. So there's this group, small group getting together, like what does the future of events look like? If you're attending an event in 2050 what does that event look like? And, and kind of looking at society of what that looks like.
Design is really considering the means of thinking about this “what if”. What if in the future. There's companies that are already doing this. More, in maybe the product area, so companies such as IKEA, they have a research lab space. They've already been looking at speculative design, how future environments are going to shape behavior and consumption patterns and looking at some of the implications of those products.
One area that maybe could have benefited from looking at speculative design would be the advances in maybe how Airbnb has caused problems for local housing markets, especially for residents and first time homebuyers who maybe are in a lower income. You have all these investors coming in now and buying all these properties to put them on Airbnb nobody's actually living in them. So it's really kind of interesting. And it seems like every larger company now kind of has a speculative design lab. Microsoft and Google and Apple, they actually hire sci-fi writers to help accelerate their innovation. And of course, not all the possibilities of the future are positive, some of them can be negative. And that's also really, really good. It's not good that it's negative, but it's good for the design process. Because what we're really focused on in speculative design is presenting the ideas. We want to articulate them visually, verbally, in words, experientially. We want to look at them from all the different angles. We want to look at all the different possibilities from all the angles, and then figure out if it's worth working towards, if it should be released into the world. There's a lot of really interesting things that happen when you're looking at speculative design.
So, how is speculative design different in terms of current practices and what exactly is that target market? Right? We're always focused on the stakeholders and the target market. So current human centered design, customer centered design, user centered design, they focus really on designing for a narrow group or identifying really who those personas or the segmentations or the archetypes that represent who your key stakeholders are. If it's products, maybe that's people somewhat likely to buy the thing, very likely to buy the thing. If it's an event, it's who are your key stakeholders you're designing for. And speculative design, you don't necessarily have such a narrow persona, which is the interesting part to wrap your mind around. Now, of course, this does not mean that we're designing for everyone. Absolutely not. It really means that we're focusing on the thinking about how our designs could impact environments and the society in the future. We really…. The thought process and the work and all of these design scenarios, kind of act as design probes that help us articulate how we want to interact with our future environment and within our future society in general.
Prototyping, which has done a lot with human centered design deals with how an idea can be realized. Speculative design really asked what if that idea was prevalent in our society, would we actually want it? It's really used as a way to ask what if, and is this actually a good idea? Before we ask, how do we make it happen? So just a little bit of a different mindset, which is just fascinating.
I talk a lot about higher education and event education. Traditionally, way back in the 70s and 80s, business schools used to teach logistics and then they really switched into strategy. We’re seeing this huge shift in event programs right now, or we should be seeing a shift if we're all being honest with each other. There's a lot of programs we're like, okay, we teach logistics at undergrad and we teach design at the grad school. That's how it's always been. Logistics at undergrad. Design in the grad school. And it should not be that way. We should really be talking about design and strategy alongside the logistics, kind of a precursor to logistics. Of course, logistics is still important. But what good is the logistics if we don't actually have the design or strategy? And why are you spending 40, 50, $60,000 just to learn logistics that yes, you could learn in five or six years of just event management experience. What is the value of that degree? And what I really love about speculative design is, it’s kind of also the switching of that process. So I advocate a lot for higher education - before doing logistics, do some design. Of course you need logistics. I'm not saying you don't need logistics, but we should focus with design and then strategy.
And in speculative design, we're also doing a similar thing. We're reversing the process. Instead of designing an event or product, we're asking what kind of society that we might prefer at large, and then we're designing products, services, events, higher education, that work towards that society, instead of just saying, okay, I'm going to do what I'm doing now and then I'm going to do a crisis management plan for 10 years down the road. So if we're thinking about tangible things, you can think about plastics, you can think about hazardous waste, you can think about oil and oil spills. There's a lot of things that are like okay, we need this now. Humans - we need this now. And we're not necessarily thinking about the repercussions or the circular design to close the loop. So speculative design is saying,okay, what's our future in 2050? And then how can we design our services, our events, our higher education to get there?
So what does this exactly look like in practice? That would be great. I'm just gonna need a roadmap there. So being in this project group, which honestly is why I've just been processing in my brain for the last two weeks of what I want to share, what I want to look at, of course, there's some things I can't share. Well, what does it look like in practice for just speculative design overall, not just speculative design in events, but speculative design overall. So it's not the same as prototyping, which I find a lot of the people that I work with have a hard time thinking about prototyping when it comes to services anyway. Because the concept of prototyping we always think about in products, you have a tangible cardboard thing in your hand or plastic thing in your hand. But prototyping is also really, really important for services. So you have a service blueprint, you have something tangible, but then you can go through and get feedback on it. So with speculative design, it's really a precursor to prototyping.
So, it's really the step before prototyping, you're making the time, which again, time is so valuable, but you're making time to have these future oriented design sprints within your organization or your industry or field. And then you're looking at these and then try to figure out the best way to kind of transform these philosophical ideas into something tangible. If you're in an organization or in a field or industry, you can kind of form a group, a transdisciplinary group and you can do these speculative design sprints, kind of like a hackathon. And then this can spur these new ideas that can form the basis of a movement towards being in the future of events. This has been really fascinating.
So when I was reached out to about this opportunity by this listener, so thank you so much for listening to the podcast, send me your ideas and opportunities! When I was reached out by this person, I said, okay, well, I need to look up what speculative design even is, and there was actually a book written in 2019, for speculative design for higher education. I ordered it within like two minutes. It hasn't come to my doorstep yet, but I'm really excited to read it and kind of see what that process looks like for them and what the outcomes and if there's thought processes about what higher education, particularly in the United States, but everywhere, what that looks like in the future. Because I do think that we are in the precipice of an incredible change. And I think all of the top 10 lists of things that will change in the next 10 years, they all have at least one, one list of what I saw the top 10 list had four or five, things that were all very relevant to higher education. And I'm here, I'm in it, and I'm super excited to not just ride the wave but to be on top of the wave, in front of the wave, to help kind of guide our industry event education into aligning with the industry and then also pushing higher education forward. So that is a really cool project. And I said, oh my goodness, how have I never heard of speculative design. I have to share this with my podcast listeners. And I am so excited about it. We're probably going to share a bunch of my personal channels so apologies if you see it kind of everywhere because this is such a fascinating topic and something that's really really cool and something that I wish more groups would do.
Alright with that. I want to always be respectful of everybody's time. I hope you learned something new in today's podcast. I value each of you so, so much. I value you. I value your time. Thank you so much for making the time to make the time. I'll talk with you soon.