Signal Scanning Starter Map

First created in the summer of 2025 for the Royal Collage of Art course Futures Through Design which I co-designed with Dr Robert Phillips, the Signal Scanning Starter Map is several things brought together in a useful template to help people see where their signals are clustering in terms of both scale and breadth.

One of the crucial questions it helped us address was when people ask ‘how many signals is enough’. There isn’t really a numeric answer to this, but a tool to give yourself a sense of how widely you’ve looked or tightly you’ve concentrated is fairly handy.

The map looks detailed and complex on screen because it is designed to either be dropped into an online whiteboard environment (e.g. Miro), or printed large at A0 size on a table for a group to add Artefact Cards or sticky notes on top of.

If you zoom in to each box, you find a combination of suggested terms from the vertical and horizontal axes. It suggested ways to start looking for signals around these intersections; for instance here we’d use the overlap between Values (ideologies, spirituality, ethics, customs human rights etc etc) and Objects (food, drink, devices, computers, books, documents etc etc) to go looking for signals under a particular research enquiry.

Online, you would typically record the signal itself as link, with a short description that you wrote about it, and a brief reason why you think it is important.

The six dimensions – Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political and Values – was the variant of the old PEST / PESTLE framework I learned from Scott Smith of Changeist. Some of the suggested prompt list in each of these sections I have taken from some work Scott and I did together on UNDP, and then embellished them a little.

The six layers I have taken from the Zenko Systems framework which I first talked about in The Product of Design, and are themselves taken from Dan Hill’s ‘Place Layers’. The suggested prompt list under these I have made up from scratch, and will revisit periodically.

The framework as a PDF is shared here under Creative Commons license for Attribution, Non-Commercial and ShareAlike.