About John Willshire
John V Willshire is the founder of Smithery, a strategic design unit based inLondon working across four broad territories of strategy, design, culture, and prototyping. All of Smithery’s work is rooted in the idea that it is betterto make things people want than make people want things.
Central to all of this work has been helping organisations learn to quickly
adopt appropriate stances through a system of movement, maps, loops and
layers. This approach creates compelling projects where both a) the specific
innovation and ideas and b) the broader experiences and behaviours can
take hold in a company.Recent beneficiaries of this approach include the BBC, Konica Minolta, Experian, EA, The Royal Society, Immerse UK, KTN, LEGO, The British Council, The Science Museum, the FSA and the V&A.
John also teaches these methods at further education establishments, and is
Visiting Professor at IED in Barcelona, where he is also Co-ordinator for their
Innovation and Future Thinking course. He also delivers keynotes at
conferences like dConstruct, Webdagene, and The Conference. One of the tools designed for this approach, Artefact Cards, have grown to become a successful range of different creative tools for ideas practitioners and companies across the globe.
Prior to starting Smithery, John was Chief Innovation Officer at PHD Media in
London, and led innovation there from 2007-2011.
Playing With The Futures Cone
As UX London draws to a close, come and explore where you, your company, or the industry might be going.
We’ll be using A Generic Foresight Process Framework by Dr Joseph Voros as a jumping off point, a seminal paper which provides a practitioner’s container for foresight, as opposed to other more ethereal, academic ones.
Specifically, we’ll be working with the The Futures Cone, an easy-to-grasp model of the potential futures stretching out before you; the probable, the plausible and the possible all twinkling across the many horizons.
This workshop will pick apart the scaffolding of The Futures Cone, and take you through a structured workshop game* of analysis and synthesis, using the notes and inspiration you’ve captured from your time at UX London as the base material.
How can we describe the potential futures of interaction design and technology? And which of them might you want to live and work in?
We’ll then reflect on the structure and setup of the game itself, and teach you how to run it for your own teams the following week, on whatever subject or sector you like. It’s a hands-on, thought-provoking end to your week.
*We can assure you that this game is not called “The Gonzo-Futures Merry-Go-Round”, because that would clearly be ridiculous…