I am essentially writing this for myself as a tool to help me learn as I work through the text and case studies, so I am sorry in advance if things don't make sense.
I know I just wrote a piece about the different types of design, but presumptive design is a little different. It is less a new type of design and more a new method for accomplishing user-centered design.
The idea is that presumptive design (or PrD) is the fastest way to converge on a future state that you or your stakeholders really "want." PrD is a design research technique that fits into the "design innovation" framework from Charles Owen, Steve Sato, and Vijay Kumar that we have all come to love/hate.
The premise behind how this works is that instead of starting with "sense intent" at the beginning of the project, you start in the prototyping/synthesis phase. The first thing you do is to invite key internal stakeholders to a creation session to explore different ideas using prototypes with essentially no formal research or analysis. These participatory design sessions will take the place of initial research. Then artifacts from these sessions will go in front of external stakeholders who will interact and discuss what came out of the session. After a few rounds of this, the entire design process will have been sped up by several times. The first idea behind this process is that all the beliefs and biases that exist before the project are put on the table so that everybody is aware of how people see the problem. Second, it gets things moving and allows for much more focussed formal research.
Essentially, PrD is fast and cheap.
But the important thing about PrD is that it should not be used to find the solution but rather elements of the problem space. PrD does not replace good analysis and synthesis, but it offers a great place to start.
Normally a team is asked to hold off on drawing conclusions or finding patterns until enough information is available. But in PrD, commonalities emerge after only a small number of engagements. Additionally, because the artifacts are certainly wrong, the team discovers misalignments between its own worldview and those of its constituents. You don't have to live with your beliefs bundled up inside your head for months, accidentally guiding your research and messing up the analysis, until you get to the actual synthesis phase.
My biggest critique about all the methods, frameworks, and tactics that we learn at ID is that it is slow (s l o w). But PrD offers a solution to this problem.
PrD is a powerful means of discovering information leading to strategic advantage through a rapid series of engagements with our constituents. The lessons learned from these engagements inform everyone on the project, from the product managers to the technologists and the UX team. One of the greatest benefits of PrD, and, ironically, its greatest risk, is how easily teams identify disruptive innovations. Because we offer our constituents views into the future, we learn where our predictions don't align with our constituents' reactions to them. More often than not, their reactions don't negate our predictions; instead they adjust them in ways we cannot anticipate. Those insights are the source of game-changing opportunities.