Every Researcher a Futurist: Embedding Foresight Into Your UXR Practice

Foresight doesn't require a dedicated futures team. It requires a lightweight, repeatable practice any researcher can fold into their existing work. Drawing on her experience building a trends monitoring system for teen and young adult audiences, Carolyn Wei shows how to set up an AI-assisted trends dashboard, apply STEEP signal-scanning and turn cultural shifts into product implications before they become obvious, with a clear-eyed view of when AI genuinely helps and when it doesn't.

This is the closing talk of October 15, wrapping up the WUD Portugal: UX masterclass Edition stage.

Most UX Research teams are optimized to answer questions about what users need right now. But identifying what comes next does not require a dedicated team. It requires a lightweight, repeatable practice that every researcher can incorporate into the work they already do. This talk argues that foresight should be treated as a Research skill, rather than a hiring decision.

Drawing on her experience building a lightweight trend-monitoring system for teenage and young adult audiences, Carolyn explores topics such as setting up an AI-assisted trends dashboard, applying STEEP signal scanning to an existing Research portfolio, and translating cultural shifts into product implications before they become obvious.

Throughout the session, she will also share concrete examples from her extensive experience of when it is genuinely worth turning to AI: not always, but when it enables us to do things that were previously, quite simply, impossible.
Participants will leave with a practical approach that can fit within the constraints of an existing UX Research team, without the need for additional hires.