The reflective discourse below is based on this short speculative film.
Navigating Teamwork and Tools
Our speculative film compresses a decade of AI growth between Maya’s 2025 debut of voice-to-video technology and her 2035 embrace of analogue film (Figure 1. below). This project showed me that a future-ready creative mindset balances disciplinary depth with team breadth and puts ethics before aesthetics. This post critically reflects on the project and its impact on my future practice.
Our project team spanned five countries and three time zones. A benefit in some ways, as Epstein expresses, when uncertainty is high, teams with at least one “high-breadth member” outperform teams of narrow specialists (Epstein, 2019, p.185). However, our project also suffered from fractured something Epstein also warns against, as repeated collaboration within isolated clusters breeds failure (Epstein, 2019, p.246). Our asynchronous workflow occasionally mirrored this weakness, causing duplicate edits and disjointed research cycles. I value team diversity, but diverse teams struggle in complex, uncertain projects like future casting without intentional and well-planned connectivity.
Despite these challenges, we pushed forward with four approaches to our research:
- ICEDRIPS scanning (Figure. 2 below) mapped impacts across institutions, culture, economy, demographics, regulatory, Infrastructure, partners, and social trends. (Parrish, 2007) We used this tool both before and after selecting our preferred scenario.
- Scenario Matrix allowed us to envision various potential futures and narrow our focus based on Micro, Meso and Macro signals.
- The Futures Wheel allowed us to consider second and third-order effects to avoid techno-optimistic blind spots (Glenn, 2009).
- Freytag’s dramatic curve (Figure. 3 below) supplied narrative tension to provoke thought (Fink, 2014; Writers.com, 2023).
Although a PESTLE analysis offers a strong policy scan, we chose ICEDRIPS for a more actionable, tech-driven approach. Evaluating our chosen tools, I see that ICEDRIPS plus the Futures Wheel provided breadth, while Freytag’s curve enhanced narrative focus, reducing the risk of a “laundry-list” future projection. However, this conscious decision limited our scope of research avenues, with an emphasis on a strong narrative. Prioritizing ICEDRIPS left several macro-drivers underexplored, trading deeper systemic analysis for emotive, human-centred analysis and potentially missing deeper ethical evaluation. Ultimately, we omitted some exploration due to limited time and resources.
Narrative Power and Ethical Gaps
Dunne and Raby advise designers to “sketch possibilities, not predictions” to provoke reflection and lead to contemplation and consideration (Dunne and Raby, 2013). We placed a Black Swan event at the narrative climax: Maya’s tool and others like it normalize synthetic performance and exacerbate a content-over-substance mentality, leading to public backlash that triggers regulation. Our scenario matrix (Figure. 4 below) pointed us to the need to contrast economic tension and production speed with cultural meaning, encouraging our participants to evaluate trade-offs that come with our future scenario. (Figure. 5 and 6 below)
In order to worldbuild around our speculative future, we engaged with current and past signals such as:
- Growing dissent and backlash to AI media (Sweney, 2024).
- BNN Bloomberg profiled estates monetizing deep-faked actors (BNN Bloomberg, 2024).
- The draft EU AI Act proposed mandatory provenance disclosure (European Parliament and Council, 2024).
By using real-world signals like these as evidence, we proposed that authenticity will become a competitive differentiator in the future.
As mentioned, emphasizing the story limited the opportunity to go deeper with tools like the Futures Wheel. (Figure 7. below) Futures scholarship shows that the strongest scenarios merge compelling stories with systematic ethical interrogation (Milojević and Inayatullah, 2015). In future projects like this, I will schedule a mid-sprint workshop to extend the wheel with metrics and then invite external forecasters to critique assumptions. A process like this would have greatly bolstered the ethical side of our process.
Learning, Application, and Creative Takeaways
This project shifted my perspective in three key ways.
- First, I now better understand that while story anchors emotion and memory, it can obscure signals if introduced too early or without structure.
- Second, working across time zones and cultures revealed how easily coordination falters. Strong collaboration requires goodwill, shared frameworks, clear handoffs, and consistent rhythm.
- Third, ethical framing and research must come before storyboarding. Reversing that order risks producing narrative based scenarios that feel polished but lack depth. In future projects, I’ll integrate tools like ICEDRIPS earlier and maintain a transparent log of prompts and decisions to support ethical accountability.
As Maya advises, “If you don’t like the narrative, rewrite it.” After this project, I would add, “If you do rewrite it, take the time to do it well.”
- Keep a broad toolbox and engage diverse collaborators at various stages; novelty lives at the boundaries (Epstein, 2019).
- Use speculative work to spark dialogue, not just declare narrative-based outcomes. (Dunne and Raby, 2013).
- Document my creative trail. Some audiences care about how work is made. A clear, traceable workflow can build trust without assuming universal interest (Feng, Yoon and Zhang, 2024).
“If you don’t like the narrative,
rewrite it.”
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Appendix
FUTURE SCENARIOS—BEYOND THE SOULLESS CONTENT TSUNAMI: A critical reflection on narrative design, foresight tools, and ethical tensions in speculative futures work
Future casting video for Hyper Island Module.
This video was created for a Master level class at Hyper Island.
There is no commercial use.
Narrative Development: Corey Lansdell, Eskil Waldenstrom, Arisa Tsuji, Hidemi Joi
Video editing and production: Eskil Waldenstrom assisted by Corey Lansdell
Research: Corey Lansdell, Eskil Waldenstrom, Arisa Tsuji, Hidemi Joi
Music and stock video from Artlist.io
Gen AI tools used :
