Winning Formula is a design fiction by Near Future Laboratory which takes the form of a newspaper sports section from the near future, exploring questions about how the beautiful game of global football might be different in a world where sport itself, and the culture of the fans who love it, is altered by the rush of data, quantification, analytics and digital delivery.
This hypothetical daily European tabloid called 'Today' is an exemplar of the way we use research, narrative and design to create an engaging perspective on a provocative yet plausible near future world. Unlike a PowerPoint deck or corporate white paper, the mundane form of a disposable daily newspaper puts into the hands of everybody a possible day in the future when data, both large and small, alters some aspects of a cultural touchpoint like sports.
The project touches on more easily seen aspects of performance analytics, and new ways to depict and consume football in media, but also explores future possibilities hiding just below the surface, possible phenomena such as data manipulation as a kind of doping, the impacts of high-frequency sport betting, or politics related to data-based services like media, measurement and reporting.
The Newspaper
Winning Formula was launched at the National Football Museum in Manchester on March 28, 2014 as part of the Future Everything festival. That day a sample of stories were inserted into 130,000 copies of the Manchester Evening News, probably making it the most widely distributed design fiction artefact. The complete newspaper consists of 24 pages printed in Tabloid format on standard newsprint paper. Later it was distributed at various exhibitions and events including at CCCB in Barcelona and Fundación Telefónica in Madrid as part of the Big Bang Data exhibition.
Winning Formula at at the Footbal Museum in Manchester
Winning Formula at at the Footbal Museum in Manchester
Winning Formula at the Big Bang Data exhibit in Barcelona
Winning Formula at work
Winning Formula at the local pub
The Process
A few people have asked questions about the "scenario design" process up front which gave us the storylines for Today. Interestingly, the process more closely resembled building a video game or writing a TV show: agreeing the general mechanics and physics of the world (which we I'd say set on 'strange-normal'), then working within the grid of the publication as our scenario frame, as such. Keeping the various narratives and mini-scenarios we developed as independent writers and futurists in synch with each other, functioning plausibly within the same world, was key for us and required ongoing coordination of an international team to ensure a reasonable level of continuity in this imagined future.
Initial concepting session for Winning Formula, Barcelona, November 2013.
As a team, we identified key topics and technologies we wanted to discuss, but also the types of stories that might appear at this stage in a season, the morning between two critical Champions League matches, heading into a major global event such as the World Cup. Sport seasons have particular arcs to them, and springtime is roughly the end of Act III in a four-act drama for many teams and leagues. It’s also a time when new media tools would be shown off in time for a global audience to focus on a single spectacle, when players and agents jockey for transfers, when stock is taken of investments, and a time when lessons learned from the previous World Cup will be implemented. In short, it’s a moment of peak disturbance in a complex global system.
We captured this complex system, including some via novel hacks using actual video game data to populate our starter universe, through a dozen or so stories, as well as through ads that might be found in a daily paper for products that seem both believable and unsettling. The pieces in Today were researched thoroughly, with as much fact blended with fiction as possible to ground a creative artwork with anchors in reality. They also intentionally maintain different voices to reflect the cultural variation that emerges in such a publication. Lastly, we paid attention to small details, from the climate change-shifted daily temperature of Manchester to imagined exchange rates, currency availabilities and technical standards. Some fidelity in the detail is important to feed plausibility.
The Winning Formula exhibit wall gives an overview of the football and data ecosystem explored during our research.