Speculative wellbeing
PRACTISE 3
The brief was open-ended in a way the previous projects weren't. No broken product to fix, no stakeholder demanding faster orientation. Just a question: what could corporate wellbeing look like a few years from now, and how could Pluxee position itself ahead of where the industry is going?
I treated it as a speculative design project. The goal wasn't a shippable product. It was a near-future scenario concrete enough to argue with.
Speculative
Futurism
Design challenge
IKEA
The frame
I chose Research through Design as the method, with speculative design as the framing. The combination is straightforward in theory and slippery in practice. RtD says the design itself is the research output, the artefact generates the knowledge. Speculative design, after Dunne and Raby, says the artefact's job is to surface the assumptions buried in current practice, not to ship.
For Pluxee, that meant building two concepts as provotypes, prototypes built to provoke discussion rather than enter production. If they made people uncomfortable, that was the point.
Using ChatGPT as a co-ideator
The most experimental part of the project was bringing ChatGPT into ideation. Not to write the concepts, but to widen the field of possibilities before I narrowed it.
I prompted it for hypothetical employee scenarios, possible features, future workplace situations. It produced a lot of material quickly. Some of it was useful, some was generically futuristic in the way AI tends to be when you ask open questions, and some was just wrong for Pluxee's context. The value wasn't in the AI giving me answers. It was in giving me enough variations to pressure-test my own instincts.
The lesson I took from this: AI in ideation is a sparring partner, not an author. It expands the range, the designer still has to choose. Treating ChatGPT outputs as raw material rather than finished thinking was the only way it stayed useful.
The two concepts
GrowthPulse is a digital service combining short pulse surveys, calendar load data, and benefit usage to give employees personalised wellbeing recommendations and HR early warnings about burnout risk. It's the data-driven, predictive end of the spectrum.
Recharge Day+ is the opposite direction. A company-wide synchronised day off every quarter, with a curated but entirely optional menu of activities, rest, learning, community, digital detox. The "+" is the structural support around the day, not extra requirements.
I deliberately built one tech-forward concept and one organisational concept, so the workshop conversation couldn't collapse into "is this a software question or not.
The workshop
Five external Pluxee collaborators, HR and wellbeing consultants, joined a moderated online session. I used I Like, I Wish, What If for structured feedback after walking them through both concepts as storyboards.
GrowthPulse drew the most interesting tension. People liked the early-warning capability, then immediately surfaced the surveillance question. How is the data used? Who sees it? What does an employee do if the system flags them? Someone suggested gamification to soften the monitoring framing, which is itself a revealing instinct, the worry isn't whether the data is collected but whether employees feel watched.
Recharge Day+ was easier to like and harder to implement. The destigmatisation of taking time off resonated immediately. The pushback was practical: a single fixed day doesn't suit everyone, and without management modelling the behaviour, the program risks becoming a benefit on paper that nobody actually uses.
What the concepts revealed
Speculative artefacts work when the discussion they generate is more valuable than the artefacts themselves. That happened here. The GrowthPulse conversation wasn't really about GrowthPulse, it was about how much surveillance an organisation can quietly accept before culture breaks. The Recharge Day+ conversation wasn't about days off, it was about whether leadership is actually willing to model rest.
Neither concept is going into production tomorrow. Both surfaced questions Pluxee needed to be asking anyway. That's the work.
