Speculative Requirements: Design Fiction and RE

Abstract

Many innovative software products are conceived, developed and deployed without any conventional attempt to elicit stakeholder requirements. Rather, they are the result of the vision and intuition of a small number of creative individuals, facilitated by the emergence of a new technology. In this paper we consider how the conditions that enable new products' emergence might be better anticipated, making innovations a little less reliant on individual vision and a little more informed by stakeholder need. This is particularly important where a new technology would have the potential for social impact, good or bad. Speculative design seeks to explore this landscape. We describe a case study using a variant called design fiction to explore how plausible new technologies might impact on dementia care.