London Futures Symposium #4: Eco-resorts

The last presentation of the day was a case-study offered by Francesca Birks from Arup who talked us through the activities behind one of their recent project’s which looked at “Eco-resorts of the Future”.

While there was considerable information on how the proposed resorts had been imagined (and far too much detail to record), it was the actual consultative process that they’d adopted that was emphasised.

The Arup Foresight team used a 9-stage futures process through which to investigate, define responses to, and, propose outcomes for the issue being considered; these consisted of; (1) Gut Reaction, (2) Personal Definition, (3) ‘Four Square’ Vote, (4) STEEP Framework, (5) Learning Journeys, (6) Emerging Trends, (7) Character Adoption, (8) Analytical Scenarios and (9) Integration of Characters into Scenarios.

While some of the above categorisations may be intuitive, I offer a short description and final points-of-interest below:

1 - Gut Reaction: Partly used as a facilitative tool to get ‘things going’, this activity sought to elicit some quantitative reaction from participants (’love and hate’ comments etc) on the topic and aimed to get people into the ‘mindspace’ of the issue being investigated.

2 - Personal Definition: eliciting individual definitions of the issue to establish where parameters or borders may or should be established.

3 - ‘Four Square’ vote: based on choosing the themes for - and then constructing - a 2×2 matrix to be used later in the process of more detailed scenario development, this activity took the themes of the matrix quadrants and asked participants to vote on where they believed the issue being investigated should be located both now and at a future date. I believe this was reviewed after the final scenario work to see if participants had revised their interpretations or impressions.

4 - STEEP analysis: using the ’standard’ framework and approach while considering “up to 150 drivers.”

5 - Learning Journeys: In this case, dividing the participants into teams and creating a series of real-life activities to engage with as a means of furthering their knowledge, understanding and awareness of the issue being investigated.

6 - Emerging Trends: Described as ‘brain-food’, this activity sought out three external guests to bring differing perspectives to the participants.

7 - Character Adoption: using the IT / web development idea of user personas, this activity sought to construct a number of plausible character descriptions (gender, age, location, personal aims, desires, etc) as a means of ‘interacting’ with the scenario outcomes.

8 - Analytical Scenarios: scenario development using the ’standard’ approach.

9 - Integration of Characters into Scenarios: Each character (created in stage #7) was assigned a particular scenario outcome and then further work was done on suggesting how each proposed resort-type would satisfy a specific type of customer. I took this as a proxy for the ethnographic /customer segmentation & profiling that would be needed to ‘match’ a physical resort with its target market.

This was certainly a comprehensive process and I was intrigued by the idea of using activities such as Learning Journeys and Character Adoption. In relation to user personas, (which I’ve engaged with before as part of the website development process) I’d be interested to consider how to use them to ‘map’ personal interpretations of differing futures in a more dynamic way - and while still maintaining the integrity or plausibility of any systemic context.

Lastly, the Arup Foresight team also offer the foresight feed blog.