Experiential futures, design fiction, artifacts from the future or speculative fiction. Regardless of its name, there has been a surge in this kind of futures work in the last 24 months. Advocates such as Stuart Candy, Bruce Sterling, Anab Jain, Justin Pickard, Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleeker argue that design-based futures are not just a shiny form of communication, but are a distinct way of practicing futures research itself. Highly visual, often emotional, and ethnographically infused, their approach brings the future alive through videos, objects, and print media. The result, they argue, is a profoundly engaging experience that goes beyond technical reports and PowerPoint presentations towards a new level of engagement.“

http://noahraford.com/?p=1625

Three principles for designing experiential scenarios 1. Don’t break the universe
This phrase, offered by our frequent design partner Matthew Jensen, became something of a master principle for developing experiential scenarios. It means that a scenario or artifact should ideally be presented on its own terms, as if transplanted from a fully realised, coherent, concretely existing alternate (or rather, future) universe. 2. The tip of the iceberg
It is both physically and metaphysically impossible to render a complete experience to-scale of a whole future. Such an ambition would be, to use a Borgesian figure, like trying to create a map the size of the territory 3. The art of the double take
The third principle for designing and staging experiential scenarios is what we have called ‘the art of the double take’. The basic idea springs from an playful, exploratory, ‘decolonising’ ethos best captured by Dator’s so-called ‘Second Law of the Future’, which holds that ‘Any useful statement about the future should at first appear to be ridiculous’.432 In this view, a key contribution of futures thinking is specifically to encourage the examination, as opposed to the automatic reinforcement, of expectations and assumptions.

From The Futures of Everyday Life by Stuart Candy

[The] question of how to create possible futures is strongly connected to negotiations and politics in existing situations. Finding appropriate methods to face controversial contexts and challenges – climate change, financial crises and embodied technologies – is one of the core challenges of our world today, involving all of us, here and now”

http://sdn2010.ch/images/Conference%20Book%20Swiss%20Design%20Network%20Conference%202010.pdf

see also possible futures parallel presents and prehearsal methods