What if the State Designed Futures?
A day in Buenos Aires revealed how speculative design, weak signals, and institutional fiction can become fundamental tools for public policy.
You walk into a room and are hit with a provocation: what if the future were an object you could touch? What if public management didn’t just react to the present but designed possibilities? That was the challenge posed at CESBA, the Economic and Social Council of the City of Buenos Aires.
This wasn’t a theory-heavy talk or a diagnostic session. It was an invitation to rehearse futures, from and for the city. To shift from static reports to debatable prototypes. To turn abstract scenarios into tangible artifacts that people can touch, question, and eventually turn into policy.
The experience also expanded on ideas first explored in “Turning the Tide: How Argentina Can Transform Short-Term Survival into a Future-Ready Strategy”, where speculative design is framed not as a creative extra but as a political tool for navigating complexity.
Why futures, why now?
We live in a VUCA world — one defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. But in Argentina, these aren’t abstract ideas. They’re daily realities.
To make this concrete, I opened the talk with a provocation:
What happens when two grey rhinoceroses charge at once?
The grey rhinoceros is a metaphor for massive, visible risks that we choose to ignore, not because they’re hidden, but because they’re uncomfortable to face.
In Buenos Aires, two of these beasts are converging:
- First grey rhino: political discontinuity.
Every new government starts from scratch. Priorities shift. Teams are dissolved. Plans are archived. Short-termism kills long-term policy. And futures design needs continuity; without a sustained vision, futures are improvised. - Second grey rhino: lack of dedicated funding.
Exploring scenarios and prototyping futures can’t be done on good intentions alone. It requires sustained investment. Without budget lines, futures work remains a one-off exercise. It’s not enough to declare its importance; we have to finance it.
Together, these two converging forces form a perfect storm. One that makes anticipation not a luxury, but a necessity.
And that’s where futures tools come in, not as magic, but as infrastructure for public imagination.
Tools to anticipate (and stop putting out fires)
Let’s try this: imagine a state tool that doesn’t just react but gets ahead. That doesn’t wait for the next crisis to act. These four practices allow just that:
- Strategic Foresight: the control tower that determines when to take off and where to go.
- Weak signals & Trends: the radar that points in precise directions.
- Futures Design: the flight simulator that allows us to enter different possible scenarios, test how the system behaves, and prepare the crew for what might happen.
- Design Fiction: the virtual reality booth that turns weak signals and trends into lived, tangible near-future experiences.
Mercado San Telmo 2030: fiction in layers
The speculative exercise unfolded like a zoom lens: from system-wide to bite-sized. It started with a map, a redesigned PDF blueprint of San Telmo Market in 2030, complete with energy flows, signage systems, policy layers, and civic infrastructure imagined as if already implemented.
Then came the interface: a fully navigable website from the near future, allowing users to scroll through vendors, regulations, and urban services as if browsing a living, breathing market platform.
The third layer was physical: the market facade, with its public-facing map and real-world signals, irrigation systems, solar collectors, and signage prototypes.
And finally, the close-up. At the heart of it: a solar-cooked empanada. Simple, familiar, and entirely recontextualized. Its wrapper wasn’t just branding. It carried nutritional info, sourcing data, energy origin (solar), real-time pricing, and certifications.
This wasn’t about novelty. It was about staging a conversation. What would need to be true (institutionally, technologically, socially) for that empanada to exist as part of daily urban life? What would it say about our food systems, our public infrastructure, our values?
These artifacts don’t predict. They provoke. They invite disagreement, discussion, and redesign.
Design fiction makes abstract policy visible and debatable.
Four principles to cultivate anticipatory capacity
- Leverage existing intellectual capital: Argentina has a history of future thinking, from Bariloche in the 70s to today’s universities. We don’t need to import models: we can activate our own.
- Prototype from within: don’t wait for the next administration. Start with one department, one neighborhood, one concrete problem. Futurizing is a skill, not a structure.
- Focus where it hurts: climate change, housing, public space, care work, and informal economies. If we don’t future-think them, we replicate them by default.
- Include more minds in the conversation: neighbors, students, universities, and the private sector. A few don’t decide the future; it’s co-designed.
Futures Anticipation Unit: a proposal for Buenos Aires
The City of Buenos Aires already has an Undersecretary for Prospective Analysis. But it’s not enough to analyze what might come; we also need to design concrete, visual, debatable scenarios.
The proposal is to create a Futures Anticipation Unit within the Secretariat of Urban Development, one of the many departments and secretariats that make up the City Government. This unit would connect three existing Directorates (Planning, Architecture, and Urban Anthropology) to explore desirable futures based on strategic “what if…?” questions:
- What if the average temperature rises 2°C over the next decade?
- What if urban density increases by 30%?
- What if mobility patterns or intergenerational cohabitation change drastically?
This unit wouldn’t replace what already exists. It would articulate it. It’s not a new bureaucracy, but a lightweight, connective, experimental cell. Its job would be to produce “what if…?” scenarios, institutional prototypes, and tangible mock-ups of future decisions.
And it doesn’t need to be launched overnight. The next step could be small but mighty: a pilot workshop involving those three Directorates. One case, one scenario, one methodology. If it works, we scale.
From Maradona to Dibu Martínez: a metaphor for a new kind of governance
Argentina is an expert in improvisation. Like Diego, we’ve dribbled through crises with genius. But we do it reactively. We’re always running, rarely pausing to anticipate. We survive, but we don’t prepare.
That’s why I proposed something different: strategic foresight. A shift in mindset. A way to explore futures before they become crises.
We can’t afford to rely on improvisation anymore. We need to be like Dibu Martínez: anticipate, position, read the play.
That’s what a Futures Unit is for.
Not something to launch tomorrow, but a pilot we can start today. Three General Directorates, one concrete case, one “what if…” question + scenario. If it works, we scale it.
Buenos Aires already conducts foresight analysis. Now, it has the chance to lead in applied futures design:
From report to prototype. From analysis to artifact.
Three ways to look further
Fabien Girardin
A multidisciplinary technologist, co-founder of Near Future Laboratory and Girardin & Nova, offered a critical and generous reflection on the Buenos Aires case. He contextualized it within a broader crisis of imagination, one deeply analyzed in Futurs? La panne des imaginaires technologiques by Nicolas Nova.
In Nova’s view, science fiction (once the fuel for technological vision) has grown stale. Flying cars, humanoid robots, orbital stations: once dazzling, now distant. We keep recycling myths from the past instead of inventing new imaginaries. Fabien’s call was clear: it’s time to shift the source of foresight. Not from fiction to facts, but from repetition to institutional creativity. Cities like Buenos Aires must not only manage but also imagine and futurize.
Miriam Latorre
An educational technologist at the School of Innovation ITBA, and UBA postgraduate programs, expanded on the pedagogical dimension of futures thinking. She shared concrete learning experiences where students explore futures through storytelling, podcast production, speculative projects, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. From the School of Innovation at ITBA to the Master’s in Educational Technology at UBA, her work proves that futures literacy is not an abstract ideal: it’s a skill being taught today. “You can wake up the futurability gene,” she said, “with the right mix of method and play.”
Some links of interest
Ezequiel Politi
A sociologist and data mining expert emphasized the urgency for the public sector to adopt speculative design as a strategic management tool. Using the PropTech 3.0 ecosystem as a concrete case, he explored how automation in the real estate market (through AI, algorithmic scoring, and smart contracts) is creating increasingly complex scenarios. He posed a central question: how can we map these scenarios, distinguishing between probable and preferable futures, to align technological innovation with public interest? His answer: by using futures design as a methodological guide to anticipate and influence change, particularly to ensure equitable access to housing.
So why not start now?
No law needed. No big budget. Just a pilot.
Three departments, one hypothesis, one scenario. If it works, we scale. If it doesn’t, we learn.
Buenos Aires already analyzes the future. Now, it can start designing it, not just forecasting what might happen, but shaping what should happen.
Because anticipating is no longer optional, it’s the only way to stay ahead of accelerating complexity. And futures design offers something the public sector often lacks: a safe space to think differently, rehearse change, and bring abstract challenges down to earth.
From report to prototype. From data to conversation. From diagnosis to policy.
When the future becomes tangible, it becomes debatable.
And when it becomes debatable, it can become real. It can become public policy.
Acknowledgements
A very special thank you to Fabien Girardin for accepting the invitation, for generously sharing his perspective, and for the trust, support, and intellectual encouragement that made my path into futures thinking possible.
Also, deep thanks to Miriam Latorre and Ezequiel Politi for joining with such clarity, commitment, and substance. Their contributions expanded the conversation and grounded it in real, ongoing work.
Gratitude to CESBA, the Economic and Social Council of the City of Buenos Aires, to its President Claudio Presman, and to the Head of Strategic Planning and Communication, Sergio Petrocelli, for opening this space. Also to Undersecretary Cecilia Virginia Rumi González, Director General Nerio Pace, and everyone who joined the session with ideas, questions, and curiosity.
Nicolás Bronzina is a strategic foresight and futures design specialist with a social sciences and user experience design background. His work intersects speculative research, strategic innovation, and climate resilience.
As co-founder of Heated Studio, he leads projects that transform climate resilience research into actionable frameworks and tangible prototypes. He helps organizations navigate uncertainty with evidence-based methodologies. He also collaborates with Fabien Girardin, exploring emerging trends and speculative scenarios that challenge established norms. He integrates generative intelligence and immersive narratives to visualize alternative futures.
His multidisciplinary approach combines qualitative analysis, speculative design, and participatory methodologies to turn weak signals into concrete strategies. From urban adaptation to technological foresight, his work transforms uncertainty into opportunity.
His work offers an alternative to Argentina’s culture of improvisation. It advocates for developing concrete tools to anticipate and shape the country’s future.
For more information about his work and publications, visit nicolasbronzina.com.
