Cognitive Debt

Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.

Having been thinking about the implications of AI in organisational and societal contexts since 2016, we have articulated the impacts as a reflection of the commonly understood ‘technical debt’ metaphor.

Three Future Frames

Over the last ten years of running futures and foresight projects for clients, and teaching design futures at the Royal College of Art and IED Barcelona, it has become apparent that it is very helpful to give people easier ways to combine the breadth and rigour of the futures space with the creativity and cognitive leaps possible through applied design methods. Three Future Frames is the orientating model behind this practice.

Participatory Design

A framework that emerged from with with Caroline Ward at Wellcome Trust, on how to thinking about making projects as participatory as possible alongside the communities you are working with.

Light, not liquid

A transformative way of thinking about information today

At the core of our practice is a new philosophy about how to think about information. The language people use to describe information in organisations shapes all of our actions, especially when it comes to metaphors. Information is often described as if it were a liquid; a pool into which we plunge, a tank we seek to fill, a tidal wave from which we seek shelter.

It is more useful to think of information as light. Individual particles or pixels coming together to form a view, a glimpse, a perspective. If we shift our thinking as information as light, not liquid, we can begin to question every piece of information we see, understanding its true nature, and establish what happens when others see it.

Where the light gets in

A Regenerative Design Field Kit

Throughout 2023, we explored the shift from the concept of ‘sustainable’ to that of ‘regenerative’. The first output of this work is Where The Light Gets In, a Regenerative Design Field Kit to help expand your perspective as you reflect on the present and contemplate potential futures.

It contains a viewer to draw your focus to different objects or situations and a set of forty question cards to prompt further reflection. The questions were created by taking the four roles from the Design Council’s Systemic Design Framework, and pairing them with the capabilities from The RSA’s 10Cs framework. The first edition sold out in weeks, and the second edition is now available to buy.

Assemblage Space

Building a pragmatic extension to the futures cone

For the last ten years, the dominant mental framework in futures work has arguably been The Futures Cone, which we have used in both teaching and client work to help people think more broadly about what they may encounter over the long term. During this work, it became clear that the nature of the framework itself can be problematic at times.

Since 2020, we have been creating a framework called Assemblage Space, a new way for people to see themselves and their organisations situated in time. It considers not just the probable, plausible, possible and preposterous of the future, but guides you to contemplate the tangible, intangible, remembered and forgotten of your past. Most crucially, it makes you accept the ‘narrow now’, and how limiting single perspectives on both the past and the future can be.

Zenko Mapping

A non-linear strategic design framework

Since 2014, we been creating a framework that brings together two different scaling factors. Firstly, how we create meaning and intent socially, from individuals, through groups, in populations. Secondly, it considers how we make things materially, from an initial sketch, through a scaffolding phase, to the final construction.

This framework is called Zenko Mapping. It instinctively helps people and teams understand where they are in a process, where else they might look to advance, and what it means to do the next right thing. As well as using this framework ourselves on client projects and in teaching, we have created custom versions for several clients to help improve their effectiveness in developing new projects and evaluating existing processes.

Artefact Cards

High quality tools for playing with ideas

At the very beginning of Smithery, John was running a workshop where he decided to commission some blank playing cards to use instead of post-it notes. Originally, his hypothesis was that people would treat a better ‘artefact’ on which to write ideas with more respect and make something better as a result.

Whilst this happened, the group also started, without prompting, to use all the cards together as playing cards. They would shuffle, deal, stack, and reorder, lending the session an even greater sense of creativity and possibility. Artefact Cards soon became a highly successful side project which is still popular around the world today.

Innovation and Future Thinking

Annual Summer Course at IED Barcelona

2024 marks the tenth anniversary of the Innovation and Future Thinking summer course John teaches with IED in Barcelona. It was originally started by Scott Smith of Changeist, and John taught two iterations of the course before taking over as the lead in 2017.

Each year we select a different theme specific to Barcelona (e.g. The Future of Food, Taking Care of Water), and bring in a raft of experts to help add context to that theme. It is an experimental teaching experience for the class and the teachers, and remains true to an initial vision set out by Scott and John to run a futures course ‘which could be taught on the streets’.