Design Fiction in a Corporate Setting – a Case Study

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While speculative methods (e.g., design fiction) could help industry to reflect critically about future products and services, little is known about their potentials and limits when applied in a corporate setting. In this case, we worked with an automobile manufacturer to explore the near future of self-driving cars. For more than a year, we speculated using diverse methods, developed stories about a future with self-driving cars, and told them through 24 artifacts (e.g., city map, quick start guides). In this paper, we scrutinize the process, discuss what has worked and what not, which challenges we faced, and how corporate requirements shaped the emerging design fiction. We saw a trend toward affirmative rather than speculative design, driven by product-centricity and the need to justify process and outcome through concrete innovation. While speculation raised interesting questions about technological futures, it remained a challenge to transform them into concrete design implications.