What if the future wasn’t something we predicted, but something we built? In innovation, strategy, and design, we often talk about the future in abstract terms. We discuss trends, emerging technologies, disruptions, and possibilities. But abstract conversations can feel distant, vague, and disconnected from real human experience.
This is where design fiction becomes powerful. And when combined with LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP), design fiction becomes tangible, collaborative, and deeply imaginative.
Together, they create a compelling method for exploring futures, not just by discussing them, but by physically building them.
What is Design Fiction?
Design fiction is a practice that uses speculative stories, scenarios, artifacts, and prototypes to explore possible futures.
Rather than asking: “What will happen?” Design fiction asks:
“What if?”
It creates imagined futures to help us think critically about:
- Emerging technologies
- Human behaviours
- Ethical dilemmas
- Social change
- Organizational transformation
- Outside influences
- Economic forces
- Environmental factors
The goal is not prediction but exploration. Design fiction helps teams challenge assumptions, surface hidden risks, and imagine possibilities that traditional planning often overlooks through discussion alone.
Why LEGO Serious Play Works for Design Fiction
While design fiction thrives on imagination Lego Serious Play makes imagination visible, tangible and actionable. This combination is especially powerful because it allows participants to move from abstract speculation to physical representation and shared narrative. Enabling the future to become something people can literally put on the table [and play with].
Making Future Worlds Tangible
One of the biggest challenges in futures work is helping people visualize unfamiliar possibilities as words alone can be limiting. When participants build future environments, systems, products, or experiences with LEGO, those futures become tangible, actionable and relevant.
A handful of bricks can represent:
- AI-driven workplaces
- Climate-adaptive cities
- Post-consumer economies
- New social rituals
- Socioeconomic impact
- Human-machine collaboration
- Neural-interfaces
Suddenly, future worlds become easier to explore.
Creating Future ArtIfacts
Design fiction often uses artifacts from the future to spark discussion.
These could include:
- A future product
- A wearable device
- A public service
- A workplace tool
- A household object
- A government policy
- A methodology
- A new learning model
LEGO Serious Play enables teams to rapidly prototype these speculative scenarios and the physical model becomes a “thing from the future.” And once that artifact exists, richer questions emerge:
- Who uses this?
- Why does it matter?
- What problem does it solve?
- What unintended consequences might appear?
- Why does the world need this?
- What is missing from the world if we don’t make this real?
The conversation shifts from speculation to inquiry.
Building Stories, Not Just Objects
Design fiction is fundamentally narrative-driven as a future product alone isn’t enough as it needs context. For example:
- Who lives in this future?
- What changed?
- What tensions exist?
- What are we missing?
- Who are we missing?
LEGO Serious Play is excellent for storytelling because every model carries a narrative. Participants can build:
- Characters
- Systems
- Environments
- Interactions
- Identities
- landscapes
They can then connect them into future scenarios transforming workshops into collaborative storyworld-building sessions that are rich in meaning and rooted in creativity.
Why This Matters
The future is increasingly complex and organizations can no longer rely solely on linear forecasting or traditional strategic planning. They need tools that help people think creatively, collaboratively, and critically.
Design fiction expands imagination and Lego Serious Play gives that imagination form. Together, they help teams move beyond predictable thinking making the future accessible, engaging, and human.
in summary
The future isn’t built through prediction alone. It is shaped by imagination, experimentation, and dialogue. Lego Serious Play and design fiction offer powerful ways to engage with uncertainty, not as something to fear, but as something to explore. Because sometimes the best way to understand tomorrow is to build it today.
