Protocol Futuring: Speculating Second-Order Dynamics of Protocols in Sociotechnical Infrastructural Futures

Paper Title

Protocol Futuring: Speculating Second-Order Dynamics of Protocols in Sociotechnical Infrastructural Futures

Publication Info

• Topic area: Speculative design focusing on protocols as sociotechnical infrastructures.
• Keywords: Protocol futuring, speculative design, second-order dynamics, infrastructure studies, design fiction, participatory design, sociotechnical systems, governance, long-term preservation, critical computing.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Traditional speculative design methods focus on artifacts and near-term user interactions, neglecting the long-term evolution, maintenance, and governance of protocols that underpin sociotechnical systems. This leaves second-order dynamics like drift, jams, and ossification underexplored.
• Significance: Protocols are foundational to sociotechnical systems, shaping interactions and coordination at scale. Understanding their long-term dynamics is crucial for anticipating systemic risks, governance challenges, and unintended consequences.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in speculative design, participatory design, and infrastructure studies has begun addressing infrastructural concerns but remains limited in engaging with protocols as primary design objects. This paper builds on these efforts to explore protocols' emergent effects over extended timescales.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Protocol Futuring (PF), a methodological framework for speculative design that centers protocols—rules, standards, and coordination mechanisms—as the primary material of inquiry.
• Novelty:
  1. Shifts speculative design focus from artifacts to protocols, emphasizing second-order dynamics like drift, jams, and ossification.
  2. Embeds protocols in their sociotechnical lifeworlds, highlighting their interactions with social, legal, and environmental contexts.
  3. Employs participatory and multi-stakeholder methods to surface diverse perspectives and contested imaginaries.
  4. Uses research-through-design techniques to generate insights into long-term governance and systemic change.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Identify a focal sociotechnical tension or problem.
  2. Construct speculative scenarios or prototypes around protocols to address the tension.
  3. Engage participants in iterative workshops, alternating between "build" and "crisis" phases to explore protocol evolution.
  4. Analyze second-order dynamics and refine scenarios through participatory feedback and adversarial iterations.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Protocol Futuring reveals second-order dynamics such as drift (divergence from original design), jams (contention or deadlock), and ossification (resistance to change).
  • Participants in the Knowledge Futurama workshop identified key design principles like relevance, interpretability, modularity, and resilience.
  • Scenarios demonstrated how protocols evolve under crises, reinterpretation, and shifting sociopolitical contexts.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Unlike artifact-centric speculative design, PF surfaces long-term infrastructural politics and second-order effects.
  • Complements empirical methods like infrastructural inversion by enabling inquiry into nascent or abstracted systems.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Case study: Knowledge Futurama, a participatory workshop exploring millennial-scale knowledge preservation. Participants alternated between designing protocols and introducing crises, revealing how protocols drift and adapt over centuries.
  • Supplementary case: South Beast Asia, a regionally grounded speculative world integrating traditional infrastructures with AI protocols, highlighting cultural and ecological dynamics.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited by participant positionalities and the speculative nature of the method, which relies on reflective enactment rather than empirical verification.
  • Future work could integrate PF with empirical studies, longitudinal formats, or real-world governance bodies to enhance practical applicability.

Summary

Protocol Futuring is a novel methodological framework that shifts speculative design's focus from artifacts to protocols, enabling the exploration of long-term sociotechnical dynamics like drift, jams, and ossification. Through participatory workshops and iterative scenarios, it surfaces the hidden politics and second-order effects of protocols as they evolve over time. Case studies like Knowledge Futurama and South Beast Asia demonstrate its utility in addressing governance, resilience, and cultural integration in speculative futures. While limited by its speculative scope, PF offers a valuable complement to empirical methods, providing a sandbox for anticipating systemic risks and designing sustainable infrastructures.