Speculative research for a shared reality

Almost everyone watches TV — on sets, phones, laptops, alone, with others. That breadth was both the opportunity and the problem. This wasn’t research to validate an existing product. We were working in speculative territory, with no fixed scope and no predetermined answer.

Before touching any research, I ran a brainstorming workshop with the team to set guardrails: social watching, personalization, and challenge-solving were in. Gaming, software-only solutions, and anything that isolated users were out.

I designed a three-phase plan: broad to specific, each phase shaping the next.

I chose literature review over primary research in Phase 1 because we needed shared knowledge across a diverse team — efficiently, before committing to prototypes or experiments in a space we didn’t understand yet. The literature surfaced one finding that shaped everything:

We stopped asking “how do we improve TV?” and started asking: how do we support TV as a shared activity?

I designed Phase 2 as a deliberate triangulation: three methods, each answering a different kind of question.

Casual interviews came first — semi-structured, starting with habits and ending with hypotheticals. One early signal: people couldn’t recall how TV made them feel when they weren’t in front of one. That told me I needed an in-context method.

The diary study solved that. Over two weeks, participants answered 3–4 daily questions and could submit photos or videos. I designed it to capture feelings while watching, not in retrospect.

Contextual inquiries closed the loop. I recruited 8 participants from the diary study and visited their homes. The diary told me what people felt. Being there showed me the actual setups, workarounds, and space constraints they’d never mentioned in writing.

The synthesis was the heaviest part. Rich, messy qualitative data that needed organizing before it could mean anything. I sorted findings into problems, barriers, desired outcomes, and potential strategies — to stay anchored to root causes rather than chasing symptoms.

Three themes emerged: immersion, shared experiences, personalized settings. I kept a fourth category — user doubts and concerns — separate rather than discarding it. If people were already worried about something, the solution needed to address it.

Design question: How can we create an immersive, shared watching experience that works for everyone?

Before committing to a direction, I wanted input from people who had never seen our research. I ran a candy sorting exercise: printed sketches of concepts, bought candy, stopped people in corridors. Brief explanation, then asked them to distribute candy across options by preference.

Participants came in cold — no briefing, no design context. They just reacted. Clear signal on what resonated before we spent time prototyping.

Sony’s stakeholders pushed for wearable AR devices — arguing wearables are inevitable and not including them meant leaving opportunity on the table.

I pushed back. Participants were wary of adding more devices when they “just wanted to unwind and be free of technology.” Wearables also create physical barriers between viewers, which is the opposite of what the research said people wanted.

A second research-backed call: interaction patterns. I asked contextual inquiry participants to demonstrate how they’d hypothetically interact with the display — how they’d resize it, move it. Those gestures shaped the design: pinch to resize, drag to reposition.

A screenless TV using volumetric display technology. No physical screen, no glass rectangle on the wall.

Since the concept used technology that doesn’t fully exist yet, no single prototype could show the full experience. So we built several: a Figma click-through for interactions, an Adobe Aero AR prototype so users could see it in their own space, and an After Effects video of the full group watching experience.

We ran storytelling walkthroughs in testing — participants interacted with all three prototypes and gave honest reactions. Several “wows” during the video prototype. People told us about the arguments personalized settings would resolve in their own families. The feature they were most excited about: the TV disappearing completely when not in use.

Sony said the project left them inspired, curious, and delighted. They liked that it didn’t depend on screens, apps, or specific technology, and that it focused on the experience and explained the motivation behind every decision.

I’d worked on defined products with fixed scopes. This started with a blank page and a five-word brief. It taught me to lead with the experience rather than the solution — to understand what people feel before asking what they need.

The most useful thing I took away: in speculative research, storytelling is the method. Not just for communicating findings — for creating alignment, building momentum, and keeping a team oriented toward the same thing.

What I’d do differently: find a way to observe social dynamics in use, not just individual reactions in a testing session. A family negotiating what to watch and how loud is different from one person giving feedback on a prototype.