N°076 - Food (In)Security Design Fiction Futures

Episode 076 is a discussion with Jan Rod and Kenta Kondo from IDEO Tokyo sharing their Project Inari in which created a sushi box as Design Fiction artifact. They collectively imagined a future that considers and reflects upon sustainable harvesting and issues of food security. It is a public project that also served to allow IDEO to explore how Design Fiction can be brought to bear to help clients make sense of their possible futures, whether food futures or any other topic. Chesterbot 🤖 Says 👇🏽 "confidence": 0.9519705766608136 IDEO designers Jan Rod and Kenta Kondo in Tokyo created a fictional sushi box to explore food security. They made an uncanny metal box resembling disposable supermarket packaging. Inside were sushi pieces they crafted. Details like powdered condiments provoked questions about the fictional 2027 world. Through workshops, the box aligned perspectives on food systems. It activated imagination beyond abstract concepts. "question": "What was the main purpose of this conversation?", "answer": "The main purpose of this conversation was to discuss how design fiction and props like the fictional sushi box can help organizations explore potential future problems and spark imagination and alignment among diverse stakeholders. The guests spoke about their experience using a fictional sushi box prop in workshops to get participants to think about future challenges around food systems." "question": How does the topic help people imagine more thoroughly the contingencies and challenges to be faced in the future? "answer": The topic of using design fiction and props helps people imagine future challenges and contingencies more thoroughly in the following ways: - The fictional sushi box created a tangible artifact that participants could examine and discuss. This helped ground the speculation in a concrete object. - The highly detailed prop packaging and labels sparked participants' imaginations about how future food systems might evolve. - The familiarity of sushi helped participants project their thinking into the future starting from something they knew. - The prop provided a shared reference point for workshop participants from different backgrounds to discuss future implications. "question": "What are five key take-aways from this presentation?", "answer": "Five key take-aways from this presentation are: 1. Design fiction uses props and artifacts to help imagine future scenarios, not propose solutions. 2. Tangible props can align stakeholders by creating a shared object to spark discussion. 3. Design fiction aims to explore future problems worth solving, not just extrapolate the past. 4. Making design fiction practices mainstream involves connecting them to company innovation processes. 5. Detailed props provoke questions about future contingencies and implications." "question": "What's a good summary of this conversation that can be used to post and share in an email?", "answer": "The Near Future Laboratory podcast featured IDEO designers discussing how they used a fictional highly detailed sushi box prop in workshops to spark participants' imagination about future food system challenges. The prop packaging and mock sushi helped ground the speculation and align diverse stakeholders in the discussion." "question": "What's a good summary of this conversation that can be used to as an engaging exciting way to get people excited to listen to the podcast?" "answer": "Hear how IDEO designers created a fictional sushi box prop to take workshop participants on a imaginative deep dive into future food system contingencies and innovations!"