Context
Telefonica Alpha was set up to explore both current and future solutions to large-scale societal problems. To understand what was possible now and over a 10-year horizon, we collaborated with the Royal College of Art to develop and examine possible solutions to emerging challenges in digital mental health.
Problem
Product teams operating inside a company are constrained by near-term delivery. Roadmaps, quarterly targets, and user feedback loops all pull attention towards incremental improvement. For Koa Health, digital mental health was a fast-moving space with significant regulatory, clinical, and commercial uncertainty over a 10-20 year horizon. Without a structured view of where the space was heading, longer-term product strategy and investment decisions were being made on assumptions rather than evidence.
My role
I initiated the programme with the Royal College of Art, and was responsible for connecting outputs back to strategic decisions within the company. Futures research and speculative design work was carried out by the Telefonica Alpha team in collaboration with the RCA team; I provided the business framing and ensured the work was grounded in questions that mattered to the company.
Approach
Working with RCA researchers and designers, we ran a structured futures process combining horizon scanning, expert interviews, and speculative design. This produced 33 distinct future scenarios across technology, regulation, culture, and social behaviour.
Rather than simply generating ideas internally, the goal was to get real feedback from people to determine whether these ideas were actually worth building. The best way to do that was to make them feel real. We turned each concept into a prototype: a website presenting the product or service, and a video demonstrating how it would work. We then ran online marketing campaigns to drive traffic to these pages, where visitors were asked to pre-register for the service. Using conversion rates as a proxy for demand, we were able to identify which concepts generated genuine interest and which did not — giving us an empirical basis for prioritisation rather than relying on internal assumptions.
Outcome
- 33 future scenarios developed, covering a range of plausible scenarios over a 10-20 year horizon
- 10 future product concepts tested with users online
- Outputs published via the Xploratory website, contributing to Telefonica Alpha's positioning in the digital mental health space
- Work directly informed longer-term product strategy and supported investor conversations about where the company was heading.
