Design Fiction: The Cone of Plausibility
No matter the company or industry, all businesses want to design a product that withstands change and lasts far into the future. To do this, they must be forward-thinking and be ready for a multitude of possible realities that are yet unknown.
Scenario Planning
No one can know what will happen the next day, the next month, the next year, or even many years into the future. However, it is necessary for businesses to have some sense of what could happen so they can prepare or make changes in the present. They must design currently and plan for future scenarios, whether it be the best possible outcome, the worst, or something unexpected.
Cone of Plausibility
The Cone of Plausibility is a diagram used to represent potential future outcomes.
Source: Prescient2050.com
The narrow part of the cone is the present, the time where we know the most about how a product/service/idea works. We understand its place in society and how it is currently doing. This is the starting point from which we can expand into the future and hypothesize what would happen if certain aspects continued or changed.
The cone widens as it moves into the unknown. Here, hypothetical ideas can be sorted based on likelihood as Plausible or Possible. The plausible ones are more realistic while the possible ones are less so but not completely unbelievable. Within these sections are two important scenarios: the Probable outcome is the one most likely to happen based on current trajectories. The Preferable outcome is the hopeful result, what would happen if everything goes right.
Of course, life can be surprising which is where the Wild Card options appear. These are outcomes that could happen if a radical change occurs between now and then.
Source: ResearchGate.net
Another crucial part of the cone is that it can be extended into the past as well. This allows us to take current circumstances and backtrack to see where it started and what journey it went through to get where it is today. By understanding past trends, we can apply that knowledge to predicting how things may progress in the future. According to the article Scenario Generation and Scenario Quality Using the Cone of Plausibility by Mandeep K. Dhami, Lars Wicke, and Dilek Önkal, “It is believed that the CoP can help analysts to overcome hindsight bias, which the UK Ministry of Defence (2013) defines as ‘The tendency to underestimate how surprising past events were, which makes future shocks seem less plausible than they actually are’ (p. 5)”
With the cone as a guide, designers can imagine futures with small or large changes and present them as stories; this is design fiction.
