This Week in Design Fiction - June 16, 2023
Management fiction, iPhones made in USA, Androids dream.
While I strive to publish this weekly wrap up on Fridays, sometimes summer happens. Even up here in Canada, it’s hard to resist the call of the wild when the weather’s nice, so this week I’m saving the compilation for some early Sunday morning writing. But in the spirit of staying on schedule I will jump in the janky time machine and post this a few days ago.
In today’s transmission:
📄How to write good product management fiction
📱Idaho Cellphone Company
🐏Android do indeed dream of electric sheep.
📄How to write product management fiction
Chris Butler discusses the role of design fiction in project management, challenging the notion that plans, roadmaps, and related documents are mundane necessities of the role. He argues that using speculative futures, role-playing, and worldbuilding techniques can create more vivid, inspirational, and engaging documents, which can better motivate cross-functional teams. His post emphasizes the need to question the status quo and understand what truly matters to organizations, customers, and team members. He introduces the PRFAQ (Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions) seen as design fiction archetype. The PRFAQs present a vision of the future state where the product positively impacts users, inviting questions that both insiders and outsiders might have.
💪🏼Design fiction with Joe Rogan
The team over at foresight studio From Later took the liberty to extend a drunken ramble from the Joe Rogan podcast into some design fiction in this series of Instagram panels. This is a great example of finding inspiration or ideas from anywhere and taking the initiative to develop it into something tangible. Love him or hate, Joe might be onto something here.
🤖🐏The Book Too Controversial To Appear On Oprah!
Augie and the crew over at the Near Future Laboratory headquarters are at it again. A brand new analysis of the Nexus 6 psyche is in the final throws of production. You can also expect a series of collectable trading cards along with a slew of merch you can wear to show off your favourite cultivator/digester model or general purpose unit.