Client: Future Tonic
Future Tonic is a consulting agency specializing in human-centered design and innovation strategy. Through ethnographic research, futures thinking, and training workshops, they assist companies to create the products and services that shape tomorrow.
Project Duration: 8 weeks
Team: Zoë Bax, Shane Burke, Nicole Chen, Jessica Gregory
A Future Scenarios Toolkit designed to Use one's Creativity more skillfully.
`
Project Summary
As generative AI tools increase in their pervasiveness and capabilities, companies are figuring out ways harness their advantages and keep a competitive edge in the market. Future Tonic tasked us to explore the potentials of GenAI tools in the consulting sector and help them incorporate these tools into their workflow. Our research aimed to understand current AI applications and how value is created across various consulting environments, focusing on their contributions to ideation, sense-making, and collaboration. Our final design provided Future Tonic with the tools needed to tackle the hardest part of GenAI tools: learning how to use them effectively.
Skills
User Research, Interaction Design, Strategy
Our Process
We conducted of series of semi-structured interviews and workplace observation with experts in three different spaces:
i) AI professionals, in order to get a sense of the technological capabilities and ethical considerations;
ii) professionals in the consulting sector, looking at market trends in workflows, value-creation, and their current use of AI tools (if any);
and iii) what we called 'embedded' consultants—people who regularly consult clients in fields, but whose would not carry 'consultant'—analyzing the same key areas as what we call 'professional' consultants.
Research Outcomes
The data revealed that the combination of consultants' intrinsic skillset with GenAI's support in ideation forms a formidable partnership, amplifying the value of both. The power of AI lies not in what it can do, but in how it can augment one's creativity and lateral thinking.
However, harnessing this synergistic partnership is difficult, due to the tools' arduous learning curve, particularly that of effective prompt engineering.
Thus, we set out to design an intervention to reduce the frictions involved in GenAI literacy.
For the full presentation of research findings, click here.
Participant Map
Affinity Map created from qualitative data revealing opportunity areas and frictions
Our Design Solution
Inspired by Future Tonic's own avid use of workshopping toolkits, we created one of our own that takes the form of a card game. The objective of the game is to collaborate with a variety of GenAI tools to quickly and creatively solve imaginary consulting scenarios. For full gameplay instructions, click here.
There are three main goals of this game:
i) leverage repetition and iterative processes to practice effective probing and prompt engineering,
ii) use a variety of GenAI tools to explore each tool's capabilities,
and iii) discover preferred functions and workflows that suit business needs.
About the Cards
The cards range from more realistic to more outlandish scenarios. This design choice accomplishes two goals we had:
i) it brings delight to the discovery and learning process,
and ii) players are challenged to use their creativity more skillfully.
Additional Uses
The cards have been designed to follow Future Tonic's current business practices and design language so that they can continue using the deck externally, even after successful integration of GenAI tools in their practice. In this scenario, the game becomes adapted into a broad 'design scenarios' toolkit that can be used with clients. As they already conduct these types of activities in their workshop curriculum, the toolkit would fit seamlessly and continue to create value.