Designing an experiential scenario: The People Who Vanished

As futures practice strives towards greater effectiveness, the foresight and design fields are in the process of discovering, learning from and remixing with each other. This paper offers a case study of an experiential futures/design fiction project co-created with workshop participants at the inaugural Emerge festival, an explicitly futures-themed hybrid arts and science event staged at Arizona State University in the city of Phoenix in 2012. The People Who Vanished was a live intervention, via performance and associated artifacts created for the occasion, reflecting on a possible future for the Phoenix area. The workshop's compressed timeline prompted the authors to create for participants a basic framework for producing experiential scenarios. That framework, further elaborated here as the Experiential Futures Ladder, is offered as a conceptual model for scaffolding experiential scenarios and design fiction going forward. Some implications for the foresight field of this multi-scalar mode of thought, as well as of the experiential turn more broadly (towards design, media, games and performance) are outlined.