First Things First, What’s a Scenario?

At the Fall Seminar 2019 we continued the joint work with scenario development. At this point, the group had already published several articles and book chapters on the topic. And now we wanted to prepare scenario development for the final ViSmedia conference in 2020/2021.

Here are the scenario guidelines that we applied at 2019 workshop, as provided by Deborah G. Johnson and Nicholas Diakopoulos.

A scenario is a story, with a setting and characters who use a technology to accomplish their goals through various actions in a particular context. Another way to think of it is as a narrative describing a sequence of actions and events that lead towards the characters’ goals.

Audience: Define your audience for the scenario — who do you want to impact with the scenario?
Expertise: Know your data: overview, know about the topic in depth, adequate background research, read up on related papers and articles
Message: Identify an appropriate message: what’s the underlying idea/concept you want the scenario to convey and is it simplified/clarified enough; is it provocative/inspiration/salient?
Actors: Identify the actors and their goals and motivations for your scenario; try to make sure their behavior is consistent with their motivations/goals; think about relationships between actors and also between actors and technology; how actors may change, how choices in scenario may change outcome; appropriate depth of actors
Context: Identify setting including country, origin, technology domain, legal / regulatory environment, market environment, social environment
Iterate: You won’t get it right the first time. Seek feedback from diverse people and see what’s plausible and what’s not, then go back and try to debug it.
Evaluation Criteria: Consistency: no internal contradictions, Completeness: no gaps in the narrative. Plausibility:it is reasonable to conclude that the scenario could happen