A future scenario is not neutral. Every world you imagine makes choices — explicit or implicit — about who benefits and who pays the cost. A future of shared electric mobility favours those who live in well-served cities and penalises those in rural areas without infrastructure. A future of medical AI empowers those with complete health data and excludes those who never had access to the system. Ignoring these tensions produces technically coherent but politically empty scenarios.
Scenario "characters" need not be novel heroes or villains — they are points of view. A retiree living alone in the suburbs. An electronics repairer in a local market. A policy maker deciding on a controversial innovation. A teenager navigating regulations they did not help write. Each character sees the world differently — and your scenario must hold up from all these perspectives.
Asking "who thrives and who suffers" is the ethical test of a scenario. It does not mean every scenario must be dystopian — it means it must be honest. If you imagine a future where technology solves a problem, ask yourself: for whom? At what cost? Who is left behind? The answers make the scenario more credible and more useful for public debate.
Tensions between points of view are also the richest source of diegetic artefacts. An ID badge that works perfectly for a "Class A" citizen but that a migrant cannot obtain. A repair manual written in technical language that excludes those without formal education. An advert for a home care service showing nuclear families but not single-parent families. Every artefact can incorporate a tension — and make it visible.
Superflux, the London design studio, excels at this approach. "Mitigation of Shock" does not show a generic post-climate future: it shows a specific flat, lived by specific people, with solutions adapted to real constraints. "Invocation for Hope" does not propose abstract utopia: it shows concrete ecosystems where humans and non-humans coexist — with conflicts and compromises included.
At Relatronica, we believe participatory scenarios must include diverse voices from the start — not as after-the-fact "consultation", but as co-construction. A design fiction lab with retirees, students, workers and migrants will produce richer, more critical and more useful scenarios than one run only by futures studies experts.