It focuses especially on the early stages of problem exploration and framing, when researchers and practitioners are deciding how a problem should be understood and what kinds of responses are worth imagining. These decisions matter because they shape the intervention directions that become possible later.

The study focuses on the smaller scope of tobacco prevention and control as a public health context in which persistent, complex problems often require researchers and practitioners to think beyond familiar intervention pathways rather than reproduce existing approaches.

Outcome-oriented: (1) How, and to what extent, might engaging tobacco prevention and control professionals in a speculative design activity support problem exploration and framing of tobacco-related problems? 

Outcome-oriented: (2) To what extent did this activity generate new ways of seeing tobacco-related problems that could potentially seed more innovative intervention directions? 

Process-oriented: (3) How did participants engage in the speculative design activities?

To examine the strengths and limitations of this speculative design workshop approach, 22 tobacco prevention and control professionals from across the United States participated in six facilitated design workshops.

Participants moved through a structured process that included reframing selected tobacco prevention and cessation problems through How Might We question generation and generating speculative intervention concepts as tools for thinking beyond familiar approaches. Participants also participated in baseline and post-workshop surveys. Workshop conversations, participant-generated materials, and surveys were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis.

Advisor: Professor William Nickley 
Committee members: Dr. Joanne G. Patterson, Dr. Sébastien Proulx, and Dr. Liz Sanders