Planning for, or in this case, designing for the future is vital.  If there is no preparation, when the future arrives, nothing will have changed.  We all know that life and society are constantly evolving so it is important to keep up with that.  In order to design things that may or may not be a possibility, there needs to be a lot of variety and somewhat strange ideas.  There are three main methods to go about designing for the future: scenario planning, the cone of plausibility and design fiction.  While the cone of plausibility is a part of scenario planning, it is substantial enough on its own.

This graphic gives a good representation as to what the cone of plausibility describes.  It is important to distinguish plausibility from possibility.  While everything might be possible, not everything is plausible.  Also, a possible preferable outcome might be different than a plausible preferable outcome.  As the time passes, all of these possibilities and plausibilities become more likely to happen.  Then every once in a while, something comes from out of left field that is still possible but was not even considered to be plausible.  What this is really showing is that everything is uncertain so it is best to be prepared for any scenario life could possibly (not plausibly) throw at you.

            The cone of plausibility is umbrellaed underneath scenario planning which is a tool for actually creating these scenarios that are plausible and possible.  It is important to remember that the scenarios created are not predictions, but rather suggestions for worst-case or best-case outcomes that one may find themselves in, in the future.

            Design fiction is one step after scenario planning.  This is the process of actually coming up with ‘real’ items or prototypes based off of the cone of plausibility and scenario planning.  It is considered fiction strictly due to the fact that the events, that these objects might be used for, have not happened yet.  And may or may not.  It is strictly another preparation step.

            When focusing on design fiction, there are a few main ideas that should be followed.  There needs to be some limit of belief that these things may actually be created in the future.  The idea can’t be so abstracted that it’s not even possible, let alone plausible.  Another one is that it is more important to focus on the day-to-day aspects of people’s lives rather than the more eccentric moments.  Those would be the possibilities that are more plausible.  Finally, while this is still considered fiction, there are pieces of fiction that can/do emulate real life.  That is the line that should be focused on and not strayed too far away from.  If that line is crossed too far, then it becomes purely fiction which, again, causes some of the plausibility to be lost.

            To further help this concept be understood, take a look at some of these examples of design fiction.  Prompts were randomly generated and fictitious artifacts or objects were created based on the specific scenario.