Climate change scenarios experience

Inspire futures thinking to reframe insurance in a climate changing world and drive innovation at IAG

Be immersed in four different futures for 2030.

Challenge

Create four plausible future scenarios for Australia in a climate changing world and communicate them to IAG business stakeholders to drive innovation and ideas for the future of insurance.

Objectives

Conceptualise and design the experience of four different worlds.
Experiences should be memorable, drive empathy, and feel real/believable.
Help people to quickly understand the events, patterns, systems, and mindsets over a 10-year period.
People should be able to differentiate between the four worlds as different scenarios.

My role

Creative experience lead

Duration

3 months (2020)

Team

The core team consisted of myself and two service designers. I led and art-directed the experience design and managed five additional designers for artefact creation.

Onboarding to scenarios thinking

The four climate change scenarios were outlined using the Oxford Scenario Planning approach and input from 70 IAG EGMs, EMs and external partners. Outlines were created to construct plausible key events, their impact, societal patterns, and mental models from 2020 to 2030.

I had four spreadsheets of data to turn into believable worlds, a significant budget, and not a lot of time.

Workshops for big (viable) ideas

We pitched 3 concepts to our stakeholders, with “future home” getting accepted.

Image: concept mockup from our pitch slide deck showing how we envisaged "future home"

“It could be extremely lame if it feels budget”

— unsolicited feedback from my colleague

Creating visual identities and characters for each scenario

Creating identities, tone of voice and characters for each scenario. And riffing the IAG brand into an identity for the whole experience.

Image: examples of visual artefacts I created as we shaped the vibe for each story

Shaping the experience concepts, and crafting a list of deliverables

32 interactive objects — objects for each world including interactive websites, email inboxes, apps, products and documents.
4 audio tracks — each world had an audio track to play during the experience to hear the character talking about their life.
4 reference documents — takeaways that detailed key information about each world.

Image: examples of the 32 interactive objects created, mostly by me and some by my talented colleagues who were keen to design something different on the side of their regular squad work and be involved to help meet our deadline.

Pulling it all together

The experience has been run multiple times in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

Image: photos from workshops with senior stakeholders

Image: My colleague Ali facilitating a workshop

Some headline outcomes

Futures thinking for insurance

Participants from senior teams had robust discussions and idea generation around the risks of IAG’s business in a climate changing world.
Innovative business ideas generated

Many ideas for adjacent and direct business opportunity spaces for IAG were documented.
Some innovations already underway

Workshop outcomes led to Firemark Ventures exploring opportunities to acquire or build innovative directions for IAG.