trans&playing futures

Diagnostics

Together with our clients we evaluate the existing problems in relation to the future.We listen, ask question, and probe clients’ assumptions about the futures, the ones expressed explicitly and more hidden, ‘shadow’ ones. This shapes our understanding of what kind of transformation is required.

Constructing ‘future spaces’

When the most relevant ‘future dilemmas’ are identified, we construct future spaces, future ‘mini-worlds’ that participants will be living it. It is a creative process whereby our hypotheses about the futures are translated into multi-sensorial, interactive immersive environments where our clients will not only be able to ‘understand’ the future better, but ‘sense and feel’ it.

Facilitating experience

We then guide our clients through these spaces, managing their immersion and interactions. We reflect initial expectations and ideas, and then go through discovery and experiences, to shape and anchor new ‘memories of the future’. Both duration and intensity of the process are personalized for every client.

Playful transformation

Depending on the clients’ issues, a specific ‘gameplay’ is developed – a unique combination of Activities, Reflection, and Creation to help new forms of thoughts and actions to emerge. This gameplay is enabled by both human interactions and new ambient technologies.

Follow-up evaluation

Finally, we evaluate, with our clients, whether transformation really occurred, what are the signals of new ideas, behaviors and practices.

The Future Complex

Our world rapidly becomes more turbulent and chaotic, more complex and unpredictable then ever before. Dozens of technological domains – computing, nanotechnology, robotics, and many more – double their performance every other year. Multiple social and economic processes – globalization, social networks, peer-to-peer production, new emerging values and practices dramatically - and very quickly - changes the world we live.

“We need different ways of thinking, being and doingif we are to live well, prosper and safeguard the future”

Josephine Green

The future becomes exponential

Companies struggle to cope with these increasing complexities of a new, unimaginable world. The old ways of working, the old ways of thinking no longer work. Companies - and people too - are less and less capable to cope with the coming futures. They become alienated from the present. They feel they are lost.

Why Playing Futures?

Philips Design has developed a unique process to help companies and their leaders to transform themselves, and to learn how to surf the waves of new futures. Trans& is a guided journey that help companies to transform, through interactive experiences with possible futures and playful exploration of the new possibilities. Tran& equips people with a new sense, the sense of Emerging Futures, and imagine new, relevant solutions for these futures.

We tend to think that future is ‘ahead of us’, that it is ‘further out. We walk forward, from ‘past’ to the ‘future’. We use a telescope to look at the future.

But members of this African tribe believe that what is ahead of us is the known ‘past’. The future – unclear, unknown – is behind you back. So they walk to the future backward – and obviously one walks backward very differently, much more carefully. Having too many unchecked assumptions about what behind your back is too dangerous.

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Philips Design as an agent of transformation

Philips Design is global community of creative professionals committed to deliver value to our clients.

We combined our knowledge and experiences of design, human sciences and technology to create solutions focused on personal and business growth

For more information contact www.design.philips.com