A scenario can mean many different things. It is for example simply a description of events, used in the arts (what a coincidence with Toffler’s quote at the beginning of this report) to help the director, producer, actor or composer to quickly grasp the main idea of the play or movie. Obviously, this is not the direction this report is going to take. Secondly, scenarios are used in user studies to communicate a design idea for a new product or service where the user takes on an active role. The designer tells/ shows a short story about a fictitious person using the interactive product. One famous example is an essay written in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, who was in charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the United States. His user scenario inspired others, which resulted (partly) in the computer interface we know now, as well as the idea of hyperlinks (Bush, 1945). Notwithstanding this report is about user roles and behaviour, also this second use of the scenario, as a single story about the way things supposedly can evolve, is not the scope of this report.
It must be noted that all different definitions of scenarios are somehow related, but in this report we will look at scenarios in a more structured way. Generally, a scenario is an account, synopsis or story of a projected course of action, events or situations, illustrating the future or an aspect of the future. A lot of methods have been developed to come to coherent and plausible scenarios. For military tactics, scenarios have been used since ancient times. The first structured scenarios (and methodologies) to be used for government and business decisions were developed for example by the RAND Corporation (e.g. Delphi method) and Shell Oil (Shell, 2003) after World War II. These are still well known and often used scenarios/ scenario methods.
structuredview of future possibilities. According to Ogilvy and Schwartz (2004), scenarios are a sort of hypotheses of different directions the future can develop. They can specifically be used to highlight the risks and opportunities involved in specific strategic issues. But they can also reveal the actions needed to pave the way towards the specific future situation.
Scenario or forecast exercises can be conducted for many different reasons (Miles, 2003). On the website For-Learn it is written that foresight activities ‘are often undertaken when a country, region or organisation feels it faces a specific challenge’. Frequently, scenario exercises are conducted to help policy makers. Scenarios provide indications and direction on which they can base their policy decisions. Scenarios are also used by organisations to test their strategies for the future. In this case, scenarios are used as strategic management tool. According to Wilkinson (1995) ‘Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures’. Furthermore, Punie et al. (2001) state that scenarios can be seen as a tool that helps to reduce the virtually infinite number of possible futures. And by doing this, at the same time, scenarios reduce the uncertainties about the future.
Often it takes a lot of time and effort to develop a plausible, consistent scenario that offers useful insights. Scenario exercises require the involvement of a lot of experts and generate many different outcomes. For example in the Future Reflections project (led by the Bournemouth Media School, 2002), four scenarios were constructed in an intensive workshop trajectory that lasted for almost one and a half years. Due to time and financial constraints, this is not possible in a small-scale scenario exercise like this. Therefore, the methodology needs to be adjusted so interesting outcomes can be achieved. In the remainder of this chapter I will discuss all steps that I will take to come to four scenarios.
Before beginning a scenario exercise, the major theme must be decided on. It needs to be answered where the scenario exercise is focussing at and what it is leaving aside. What question needs to be answered? Some scenarios are written for a single company, some are written for the whole world. The topic(s) need to be determined and the perspective the researcher is going to take. Is the scenario written from a confined, micro perspective, or on a more macro level? Due to these different options, no scenario exercise will be exactly the same. One can assess different topics with the same perspective or the same topic from different perspectives. This depends on the question that the researcher is trying to answer. Without this focus, the scenarios will be too general and unclear.
Besides focussing a scenario exercise, also the time frame for the exercise is a variable that needs to be specified. It will make a difference whether the time frame is set in the near future (say five to ten years from now), or in the very distant future (for example in fifty years). According to the FOR-LEARN website, more action-oriented scenarios will have a short time horizon, while more vision-oriented scenarios will have a longer time span. This is necessary to be able to take along for example social or demographic developments.
After determining the focus and time span of the scenarios, the main driving forces in the scenario field for the defined time frame need to be listed. These drivers are variables that will possibly influence the scenarios. In many scenario exercises, drivers are determined by a panel of experts. In brainstorming sessions and workshops lasting sometimes for over two days (or several months in different countries), they try to reach an agreement on these different drivers. These can be classified in different categories, for example economic drivers, technological drivers, political or social/ ethnographic drivers. When these drivers are defined, they are ranked by the experts according to importance and uncertainty. According to Kleiner (1999) we need to answer whether each driver is unchanging or not, if it is uncertain and if it is the driver that supposedly is going to make a difference.
Considering the limited time frame for this scenario exercise, and the fact that several scenario exercises that focus on the media sector in the digital age have already been conducted, I will build the list of drivers on existing material. This enables me to limit the time span of this second step. I will summarize and classify all drivers present in a number of scenario exercises that have already been conducted for the media domain. To check the importance of the drivers for our focus and scope, this list will be judged by a team of experts within TNO (The list of drivers can be found in the appendix of this report, see Appendix one: list of drivers, Appendix one; the names of the experts are noted in appendix two). The experts will make an assessment of the importance of the different drivers for future user roles.
What defines the axes in a scenario exercise? As has already been explained, expert workshops are often deployed to draw up a list of important drivers. From this list, the experts define the drivers/ bottlenecks that are most uncertain in that particular sector. These uncertainties are used to shape two axes. Some scenario exercises use one or three uncertainties to draw up the scenarios. To broaden the possibilities, but keep the effort minimized, I will use two axes in this scenario exercise. These axes mark the outer limits of the four scenarios. The drivers and bottlenecks that are not qualifying the axes will be used to fill in the quadrants of the scenarios.
Looking at the axes, four scenarios can be defined. In the words of Wilkinson, it needs to be underlined that “we recognize that the “real” future will not be any of the four scenarios, but that it will contain elements of all of our scenarios. Our goal is to pin down the corners of the plausible futures. These corners are exaggerated—the outer limits of what is plausible. Thus, our scenarios will have a near-caricature quality” (Wilkinson 1995). The advantages of using a scenario matrix are that scenarios are qualitatively divergent in a logical, deductive, non-random way, and secondly it assures that top scoring key factors will be drivers in all scenarios (Ogilvy and Schwartz 1995).
The scenarios will have characterizing titles. This makes the scenarios more distinct and appealing. In ‘The end of television as we know it’, a report by IBM Business Consulting Services (2006, p.11), the writers identify three types of users: lean back consumers; (1) the Massive Passives, and lean forward users; (2) the Gadgetiers and (3) the Kool kids. The writers of the report have characterized the users for example according to the screens they use, content preferences and the kind of advertising they see and hear. The characterizations are very much based on age. The Massive Passives are older people (above 60 years old), the Gadgetiers are people around thirty and the Kool Kids are in high school. I will also try to characterize user behaviour in the four different quadrants. But these classifications will not be based on age groups, but on the developments in the sector and the roles that users take on.
In the remainder of this report, I will define the scenario outline (according to the steps described in this chapter) and sketch the four scenarios. But first, to get a better understanding of the way different scenarios are constructed, under the existing scenarios tab, I will discuss six scenarios that have already been finished. The analysis of these scenarios will serve as backbone for this scenario exercise. It will give important directions for the exercise in general and more specifically provide clues to list the drivers in the media and entertainment domain.
These steps are mainly based (in succinct form) on the scenario methodology presented on the online foresight guide of FOR-LEARN