So, there I was — preparing to facilitate a workshop at the AIGA Design Conference here in Los Angeles. Tomorrow I will be leading the workshop which I titled “Imagine the Futures of Creative Practice: A Design Fiction Workshop”.

While I was preparing and such an algorithm somewhere shoved me down a hallway in which I stumbled across Lisa Kay Solomon’s reflection on futures facilitation. It made me think about what that looks like in my own world, and had me adjusting some of the setup for the workshop.

In my creative practice I rush to the artifact, not the agenda. Let’s call this a kind of materialized speculation or speculative prototyping: creating tangible fragments from possible worlds, not to predict or persuade, but to provoke conversation.

What are these?

These are artifacts (objects) that don’t explain; they invite. They aren’t prototypes of products, but props for dialogue—things that help people ask, “Who’s future am I living in?”

They are, as I’ve described elsewhere, “conversation pieces” that help craft and author stories about what the world could be like. Things you might find if you were a time-traveling cultural anthropologist-anthropologist, sifting through the detritus of a possible near future world.

Rather than frameworks, matrices, or vision decks, I’m really drawn to this image of a kind of ‘field of fragments’, where the “field” is the space where the artifacts might be found or have found themselves arranged. The fragments in that field can be interpreted and “read” as clues indicating, in a way, the texture of a possible world. They indicate, as material cultural artifacts, the hopes, fears, dreams, and dreads of the inhabitants of that world.

Imagine trying to understand a culture by what it leaves behind — things like receipts, packaging, documents, toys, photos, newspapers, billboards, etcetera. These fragments become mental prompts — tangible and relatable and legible things that help participants explore not an abstract future, but the texture of one that feels strangely real.

So what do you do with those things? What do they enable or activate in a creative workshop?

In a workshop this shifts activities from guiding consensus to curating encounters. You’re not steering a group toward “closure” or a next-step roadmap; you’re building a world they can momentarily inhabit and question from within.

Does this sound esoteric?

I tell you, in practice it’s deeply pragmatic. When people can touch a future in this way - with these mundane banal everyday normal artifacts such that they can handle it, read it, imagine themselves inhabiting the world from which these artifacts emerge? When that happens, they engage differently. They start noticing what feels desirable, what feels off, what feels eerily plausible. The conversation turns from what could we do? to what are we already doing that leads us here?

This is futures facilitation as provocation rather than persuasion—less about resolving uncertainty, more about learning to dwell productively within it.

So yes to Lisa’s insight: less frameworks, more fragments. Fewer slides, more receipts. Less knee-jerk consensus, more awareness.

And maybe that’s the work right now? Curate spaces where people can rehearse futures before they arrive, and discover together which ones they actually want to live in.

How can we bring this approach into the work of organizations that are challenged to imagine and create futures that are not just efficient, but meaningful in a world in which meaning is the most scarce — and valued — resource of all?