Fortune Telling and Speculative Design, For Fun and Profit
How design engineers can explore possible software futures, with a look at how GitHub Next builds and tests its bets. A practical toolkit for spotting weak signals, tracing second-order effects, and making theories tangible through prototypes and artefacts from the future.
How do you make useful bets about the future when the tools change every week? Maggie argues that design engineers are well placed to explore what comes next: they can design convincing interfaces and understand enough of the software underneath to make their ideas real.
She shares how we work at GitHub Next, from rough prototypes and quick feedback to building theories together about where software is headed. Making something tangible is only the start. We also need evidence to test our ideas, a credible path to production, and ways to convince the wider organisation that a bet is worth making.
The talk walks through six tools for doing this work yourself: the futures cone, weak signals, second- and third-order effects, playing with ideas, artefacts from the future, and making your theories concrete and public. That might mean inverting an assumption about agents, imagining a future error state, or building a small prototype that helps other people see what you mean.
Read the slides and full transcript from Granola Design Engineering Night #10.