HOW WE WORK
Unreal Cities Studio draws on a wide range of research techniques and design approaches, including speculative and critical design, experience design, interaction design, service design, product design, graphic design and branding.
In our projects, we work with these across four key activities:
WORKSHOPS
Participatory workshops lie at the core of our practice and all of our projects. Our custom-designed tools use storytelling, games and design activities to provide a collaborative space where you can work together to imagine different futures and explore their implications.
EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPING
We create speculative design prototypes that bring your future visions into physical reality, allowing you to see, grasp and share them. These can take the form of high-fidelity design objects, toolkits and card decks, experiential offerings, and reports, recommendations and white papers.
DEEP CONTEXTUAL RESEARCH
Our work is underpinned by rich theoretical ideas and powerful research methods. We apply these to conduct deep research into the contexts of your organisations and the challenges you face, resulting in rich insights and unexpected new avenues to explore.
ENGAGEMENT ACTIVITIES
We build engagement activities around your creative visions and our design outputs: slide decks, talks, exhibitions and performances. These will engage and persuade decision-makers, stakeholders, and community members to embrace the futures you have envisioned.
OUR TOOLS
We have developed custom tools and frameworks to guide our studio practice, underpinned by academic research and a rich range of theoretical ideas about futures thinking, design, society and the environment.
ECOLOGICAL DESIGN FRAMEWORK
Our validated design framework is provides an approach to designing and imagining futures in a sustainable and equitable, ecology-centred way. The key elements of the framework are the Conceptual Guide of the Strange Stranger, three strategic goals, and six strategies for future making.
CONCEPTUAL GUIDE
We use the conceptual guide of the Strange Stranger to help us to go beyond human-centred assumptions and foreground ecological relations.
STRATEGIC GOALS
We help organisations work towards three strategic goals: care, collaboration, and seizing futures.
FUTURING STRATEGIES
We draw on six collective strategies for achieving better futures: making, playing, time travelling, mapping, and meal sharing.
SpeculaTIve Design Playsets
We have developed Speculative Design Playsets as tools to help put the ecological framework into practice. They use games and design activities to put rich theoretical concepts into the hands of communities and organisations as accessible and creative tools.
Our playsets are designed to lead you through an entire design project, whether in a short workshop or a longer term project, from research to idea generation to the creation of design objects. They are also modular and adaptable, with their components able to be used individually for gaming, community building and design activities.
Strange Strangers in Strange Lands Playset
Our signature playset, Strange Strangers in Strange Lands, uses the guide of the Strange Stranger to explore biodiversity challenges in local environments through speculative storytelling and design. This playset can be adapted to engage with particular challenges your organisation faces, or can be the starting point to create an entirely bespoke playset. It contains…
Collaborative Storytelling Game
The collaborative storytelling game is the core part of the playset, allowing groups to work together to envision future scenarios of more biodiverse worlds.
CONTEXTUAL DESIGN RESEARCH
The design research activities in the playset allow you to frame a local biodiversity challenge your organisation would like to address, and to explore how well the futures you imagine could address these.
Speculative Fiction Prompts
The game uses imaginative prompt tiles drawn from science fiction and fantasy stories, allowing you to build on familiar narratives to explore possible futures.
Design Challenge Deck
A deck of creative design techniques to turn the strategies of framework into tangible activities. These will challenge you to bring the futures you want to work towards to life.
COMMUNITY BUILDING
A core principle of our practice is to support people coming together to address a challenge together, whether in communities, organisations, groups or companies. We provide this support in three ways:
CREATING SPACE
Our workshops and playsets provide a space outside of the day-to-day world that allows people to play together and collaborate creatively on envisioning better futures.
PROVIDING FOCUS
We use workshop activities and narrative prompts to help communities find a common purpose: a challenge which they can focus on and use to build collective ideas around.
CAPACITY BUILDING
Our participatory focus and co-design methods help communities to build their own capacities, develping the skills to use design and storytelling to achieve their goals.