ABSTRACT

As Industrial Design is a practice that uses prospective thinking, the quality of these ideas, translated into future scenarios, speculations, or futuristic design concepts, must be innovative enough to trigger discussion and provoke, but at the same time, believable and close to an area of what could happen. It might be difficult for industrial design students and professionals to understand the balance between what is possible and fantasy. This paper describes an ideation tool named The Prediction Generator©, an ideation instrument developed by Studio José de la O designed to help designers, researchers, future thinkers, and in this case, design students to generate, validate, and articulate any design brief, research hypothesis or future Scenario. The Prediction Generator© is a canvas-like toolkit that works by filling six consecutive slots: Desires, Similar Cases, Patterns, Limitations, Questions and Hypothesis. Later, this paper describes different examples of how this tool was deployed on academic projects, ranging from speculative design projects to real-life social design assignments, and the perception of the students before and after they used this tool and a description on how this tool was applied.

Keywords: Industrial design, innovation & creativity, toolkit, speculative design, critical thinking, educational innovation