Okay. I'm going to keep going with this one:

Speculative Strategy..

I see it like this.

Start with one of those weak signals — we've got plenty these days — or perhaps a hunch or instinct, or an observed and perhaps curious new kind of social ritual or practice, or perhaps an emerging technical possibility that speaks to new modes of value creation.

Okay. So then what?

Well so..in last Friday's Office Hours (N°314 - see the item at the bottom of the mail), Graeme Reid did a share — formative ponderings around his RCA Design Futures project, After Sterility: Negotiations with the Microbial Home.

He started off with a familiar equation — sterile == safe — derived through a set of questions about cleaning culture, cleaning products, microbial diversity, religious incantations (cleanliness is next to godliness), Scrubbing Bubbles™ and Lysol™, hand sanitizers, pro- and prebiotic drinks/surface cleaners/emolients/salves, and then the kicker — what if homes might make room for microbial life?

It was a good one. A nearly 2 hour ranging discussion built on his 10 minute prompt. Give it a listen.

But then how does one turn that discussion and its signals into something that an organization can use to reason about in its own context? How does one turn a research vector into something that helps an organization reason about its own choices, commitments, and future-facing strategy?

This is where Design Fiction becomes useful to organizations. It gives strategy an artifact as a container for all of the discussion.

After that presentation, we went for a long walk around Denver. (The “we” being myself and my old friend Rafael Fajardo.) We were pondering how to wrap all of that generative material from Graeme and the rest of the Office Hours crew into something that could express the multitude of implications.

Without overthinking it, we started with a library card, not knowing how it might help. It was just a passing thought of a quotidian “container” — and that got bigger, imagining that a library in this world in which dirt is no longer a contaminant but a living thing might have a collection of living things, and that those things might be returned to the library after use, and that the library might have a desk for checking out and returning living things, and that the library might have a data hybridatarium for studying the microbial diversity of indoor environments, and that the library might have a civic obligation to maintain and manage and cultivate microbial diversity in indoor environments.

This is what I would call a quick sprint – and it had the goal of creating some artifacts for a workshop in the evening, so we went quickly and delivered these artifacts from a plausible future contextualized around a refiguring that said that microbes are not to be avoided, but to be reconsidered as to their value and benefit to health and wellness. It all worked out quite well, I would say; an unexpected translation of Graeme's presentation into some speculative artifacts that exhibited the outcomes of a strategic shift, broadly: Denver Public Biometic Biblioteque Data Hybridatarium.

Now, I'm not saying this is a prediction, or a prognostication, or a forecast, although it might be. I can see a world where there's a rewilding movement that really takes hold.

I'm sharing this here because it is a working example of how research speculation can be turned into a speculative strategic artifact that one can then use as a way to vividly augment the strategic research.

p.s. I got particularly excited about one of the ideas which was centered around a ritual that will be familiar to most here — the ritual of not wearing shoes in the house, or wiping one's feet before entering the house — the ritual of keeping the outside outside, and the inside inside. In this adjacent world we conjured, that ritual is no longer a given. It is a ritual that is now counterproductive to the goal of cultivating microbial diversity in indoor environments. Looking down at my Birks, I imagined a shoe purposefully used to bring in good microbial diversity into the home.

As discomfiting as that might be, it is a useful artifact for thinking about the implications of Graeme's research and the questions it raises.