“Data-driven machine learning systems can make perfect predictions as long as history repeats itself. Creativity, innovation and development, however, require different kinds of anticipation.”

— Dr Ilkka Tuomi

In order to contextualise and shape strategic decision making within SICPA’s R&D organization, the project used mixed-methods design research, alternative futures exploration and speculative interaction design in an attempt to ask new and relevant questions about trust across future societies. Undertaken during the Covid-19 crisis, a time of dense and rapid change, many of our assumptions about the future were quickly challenged while others were confirmed or adjusted. 

Key project activities undertaken include ethnographic interviews with key stakeholders within SICPA; curating tech trends with the agency Envisioning; developing functional models of trust we could reapply; broad horizon scanning with a huge number of weak signals, trends and drivers; developing scenario narratives from trigger events, unpacking how citizens and institutions would react; causal layered analysis, unpacking the meaning of our different futures for the organisation; aggregating a collection of latent heuristics from previous workshops and the interviews that informed our prototyping; and the generation of interaction, UX and visual design tracks for the speculative artefacts.