Summary
UX research is inherently future-oriented. As researchers, we are often on the lookout to understand what users expect, what they anticipate to happen, and what they hope will come next. How we orient ourselves towards the future is part of how we experience the present. By drawing attention to the nuances of different future orientations in everyday life, we can unlock new depths of understanding to improve product and service design. Join this session to learn how to center the future as an object of study and apply frameworks from futures anthropology to advance tactical and strategic research.
Key Insights
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Futures anthropology provides a human-centered framework to understand how people orient themselves to the future, distinct from prediction or big data trend analysis.
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There are six core future orientations: expectation, anticipation, speculation, potential, hope, and destiny, each with unique characteristics influencing present behavior.
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How individuals view the future actively shapes their present actions, thoughts, and emotions, which UX research can observe and analyze.
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Current UX research mainly focuses on present states but can bridge into near futures using futures anthropology to inform design and strategy.
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Applying futures anthropology in practice reveals multiple touchpoints in user journeys to address future-related user needs and emotions.
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Negative future orientations like fear or hopelessness can coexist with hope, prompting the need for nuanced approaches especially with marginalized communities.
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Researchers can plan and design studies to capture future orientations explicitly by priming note takers and structuring interview guides accordingly.
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Futures anthropology emphasizes the plurality of futures and underscores the importance of democratizing future visions to include marginalized and minority communities.
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Future orientations overlap and interplay; for example, speculation can precede anticipation, and hope might follow the recognition of potential.
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The approach empowers UX teams to better strategize product features and improvements by understanding users' anticipatory actions and expectations.
Notable Quotes
"There are over 7 billion versions of right now, because we all experience time differently."
"Our default mode when we talk about time is to think about the past, but UX research is inherently future oriented."
"Despite focusing on the future, we lack a framework to recognize the impact the future has on the present."
"How we orient ourselves to the future impacts how we experience the present."
"Futures anthropology is a cross-cultural approach examining how individuals and societies envision and express the future."
"Expectation is a specific conceptualized future state that is visible yet out of reach—our horizon line."
"Anticipation involves preparatory actions we take to influence or ready ourselves for future uncertainty."
"Speculation fills in the gaps where past experience fails us, where imagination and conjecture reside."
"Not everyone has access to future orientations; capacity to aspire varies greatly across communities."
"We have a role to play in democratizing the future and amplifying more visions of what that future can hold."
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