Waiting at a bus stop should never feel like a test of courage.

Yet for many women, the simple act of waiting can become a constant calculation of risk, where to stand, who is nearby, how long the bus will take, and what to do if something feels off. She may be reading the street, listening for footsteps, watching reflections in the glass, deciding whether to look tough or invisible. Her phone becomes a shield. Her route becomes a strategy. Her body learns to prepare before anything has happened.

This is the quiet failure of the city, when spaces ask people to be constantly alert and afraid. Safety becomes something women are expected to carry with them, rather than something the city offers back. So the question is no longer only how women move through the city, but why the city has not learned to wait with them.

The Burden of Safety

A bus stop may seem like a small part of the city, but it can reveal a much larger failure. Cities are designed with the assumption that public space is neutral, as if the same shelter, the same street, and the same journey are experienced equally by everyone.

Safety in public transport is often treated as something that can be solved by watching more closely. Surveillance is added and people are told to report suspicious behaviour. These changes may help respond to incidents, but they do not always change the feeling of waiting in the first place. Being visible to a camera is not the same as feeling seen by the city.

This matters because design is never neutral. Costanza-Chock (2020) argues that design can reproduce inequality when it does not question power, access, and who has been excluded from the design process. In public transport, this means asking who the system is really designed around. Today’s journeys are linear, travelling from home to work, then back again. But women’s mobility is often more complex, shaped by care work, household responsibilities, and multiple stops across the day (Scheiner and Holz-Rau, 2017).

This is where the burden of safety becomes unequal. The space itself often stays the same, while women are expected to adjust their behaviour around it. A bus stop may be treated as a regular transport point, but for the person waiting there, it is also an emotional and social space. Feminist speculative design helps reveal this gap because it questions how gender, power, and oppression shape everyday life, rather than imagining futures from a privileged or universal point of view (Prado de O. Martins, 2014).

When Waiting Becomes a Design Question

From this point, we looked at speculative design to move from critique into possibility. Instead of predicting one fixed future, we used the futures cone to think about other futures, what is probable, plausible, possible, and what may feel impossible from where we stand today. Some futures feel more likely because they follow current trends, while others require bigger shifts in policy, culture, technology, and public values. This helped us understand the project not as a prediction, but as a designed possibility that allows us to question the present (Auger, 2013).

Alongside this, we looked at feminist speculative design, which helped us question who is included in imagined futures and whose experiences are overlooked (Ahmed, 2017). Intersectionality became important here, because the future cannot be imagined as one universal experience (Prado de O. Martins, 2014). For our project, this meant the aim was not to design something smarter, but to imagine a city that takes women’s experiences of waiting, moving, and feeling unsafe seriously.

This led us back to the question,

However, we narrowed it down further.

This thinking eventually led to our final concept: Bus Havens, a future public transport system where bus stops become spaces of care. The project imagines a city where safety is not about surveillance or prevention, but about how a space makes people feel while they are there.

It asks what urban mobility could look like if the city stopped asking women to adapt, and started adapting around them.

Our project sits between the plausible and the possible. Grounded in real issues, such as women’s safety, unequal mobility, care work, and surveillance, but it stretches these concerns into a future where public transport spaces are reimagined through care.

But if this future exists in 2038, then something must have changed before it. Policies, technologies, public attitudes, and ideas of safety would all have had to shift. So the next question becomes: how did we get here?

Building the World of 2038

The Narrative

By 2031, the way people moved through the city had started to change. Micro-mobility became more common. But this was not shared equally. As some people moved through the city with more choice, others were left relying on buses because they had fewer alternatives.

As bus use heavily declined, bus shelters became quieter and more exposed. Waiting alone started to feel more visible, especially for those who already felt vulnerable in public space. At the same time, cities continued to respond to safety through familiar solutions. But these responses did not fully address the feeling of waiting, or the tension that comes with it.

By 2033, this pressure led to the introduction of the ACE Act: Adaptable, Comfortable and Equitable. In our future world, the Act changed how bus stops were designed. From these changes, Bus Havens began to emerge. The ordinary bus shelter was redesigned with warmer lighting, clearer information, more comfortable waiting areas, and features that helped people feel connected. This was an important shift because it moved safety away from being only about crime prevention, and towards the everyday experience of people waiting.

Following the ACE Act, the first Bus Guardians were introduced to prevent the shelter from becoming occupied in ways that make others feel unable to use it. They became part of the social layer of the bus stop, someone visible, approachable, and connected to the community.

By 2038, Women-only Bus Havens and care routes were introduced to respond to the more complex ways women often move through the city. These routes challenged the idea that journeys are always linear. The aim was to design mobility around real patterns of everyday life, rather than assuming every journey follows the same route from A to B.

Alongside this, selected Bus Havens were recognised through a fictional UNESCO-supported framework as Living Social and Transit Ecosystems under the Safe Space Series. This recognition marked a final shift in the world we built. In this future, waiting was treated as part of urban life that deserved care.

The Process Behind the Future of 2038

01. Reading the Present for Future Signals

To create the narrative on our speculative world we started by looking at signals from the present and asking how they might develop over time. At first, the challenge was that the topic felt very broad. Women’s safety, public transport, urban design, care, technology, and inequality were all connected, but we needed to narrow the focus into something specific enough to design for.

This is where horizon scanning helped us. We used it to identify early signals and trends around how cities are changing, such as the rise of micro-mobility, declining bus use, concerns around women’s safety, AI-driven job loss, and the growing use of surveillance in public space. Instead of treating these as separate issues, we began to connect them. A pattern started to emerge, a future where mobility becomes more fragmented, and where the people still waiting for buses are often those with the least choice.

From there, the bus stop became our focus. It allowed us to bring these wider issues into one everyday space. The shelter became a way to explore who is supported by the city, who is left waiting, and what kind of safety public infrastructure is expected to provide. The signals we gathered became the building blocks of our world, helping us move from a broad concern about women’s safety to a more focused speculative future around waiting, and care.

02. Co-Designing With the People Who Wait

The people who wait are the everyday users of the bus stop, women travelling alone, caregivers making multi-stop journeys, older people, people with complex needs, night-time workers, young people, and people who depends on buses as part of their daily mobility.

Designing for women does not mean designing for one fixed group. Women’s experiences are diverse, shaped by intersectionality and how they move through the city. By centring women’s safety, we were also able to think more widely about the needs of many people who wait. In this sense, designing for women became a way of designing for more people.

We started by co-designing with fellow students who use buses as part of their daily commute to university. Instead of asking them to design a bus stop immediately, we first asked, what does safety meant to them. Their answers showed recurring themes. Many connected safety with familiarity, such as loved ones or home. Others described comfort, like being in bed or being in a space where the body can relax. Some spoke about boundaries, such as protection, self-defence, or having a barrier between themselves and danger.

We then gave participants a scenario, waiting alone at a bus stop at night while a stranger walks towards them. We asked what superpower they would want in that moment. Many responses involved wanting to disappear, run away, or freeze time. When we asked what superpower they would want the bus stop to have, the most common responses were security, emergency buttons, or ways to call for help.

Together, these responses showed us that safety is not only about the absence of threat. It is also about comfort, familiarity, control, and the feeling that support is available before something goes wrong. This also revealed that people often imagine personal safety through escape, while they imagine the bus stop’s role through emergency response.

We also explored materiality. We showed participants a range of objects and asked which one would make them feel safest. Similar to the first co-design activity, many participants chose a blanket. They associated it with softness, warmth, comfort, home, and connection.

This helped us understand that safety is not always imagined security. It can also be felt through softer, more familiar materials that make the body feel calm and protected. The blanket became an important insight because it showed how care, warmth, and emotional reassurance could become part of how a public space is designed.

We then moved beyond the university and spoke to people near bus stops in London, asking similar questions about safety and their experiences of current shelters. Many people pointed to lighting and accessibility as the weakest parts of existing bus stops. One older woman we interviewed shared that seating was a particular problem for her. Because the bus stop did not offer enough comfort or support, she often waited nearby instead, where she could find somewhere else to sit.

We also asked what they would change about current bus stops. The most common answers were better security, improved lighting, and more seating. This showed us that people were not only asking for protection, but also for basic comfort and dignity while waiting.

After this, we showed participants our prototypes for future Bus Havens. The responses were mixed, which was useful. Many people felt the ideas were positive and could make waiting feel safer and more comfortable. However, others raised concerns that if bus stops became too comfortable, they might be used in ways that could prevent passengers from accessing the space. This became an important tension in our project: how could a Bus Haven feel warm, welcoming, and caring, while still remaining accessible and purposeful for the people waiting for transport?

03. Designing Evidence from the Future

In order to make our world feel real, and to allow people to step into it as if it already existed, we created a series of fictional artefacts from different years between 2031 and 2038. These acted as diegetic prototypes, objects from within the future world that help explain how the system works, what values shape it, and how people might encounter it in everyday life. Instead of only describing Bus Havens, we wanted to show the evidence of a world where they had become part of life.

Ace Bill (2031)

The ACE Bill was one of the first artefacts we created to explain how this future became possible. ACE stands for Adaptable, Comfortable, and Equitable, and the bill reframes bus shelters as more than transport infrastructure. It explains a policy shift where public waiting spaces are critiqued not only by efficiency or safety statistics, but by how well they support comfort, accessibility, emotional safety, and belonging. This helped us show that Bus Havens did not appear from nowhere, they were the result of a wider change in how the city understood its responsibility towards the people who wait.

Bus Guardians (2033)

We then developed the Guardians of the Haven as a human layer within the world. The uniform prototype helped make this role visible and believable. It allowed us to think about how authority, care, and approachability could be communicated through colour, material, and identity.

Newspaper (2038)

The 2038 newspaper helped us show how Bus Havens might be discussed in public culture. Rather than presenting the future as completely perfect, the newspaper allowed us to include both praise and criticism. It reported on the recognition of Peckham Bus Haven, but also raised concerns around the Guardians scheme and the possible outsourcing of responsibility. This made the world feel more realistic.

Unesco Recongition (2038)

The UNESCO recognition artefacts helped us imagine how Bus Havens could become valued as civic and cultural spaces, not just transport stops. Through the fictional Living Social and Transit Ecosystems framework under the Safe Space Series, selected Bus Havens, such as Peckham Bus Haven, were recognised for creating safety. The folder and award gave the future a sense of institutional legitimacy.

Care Routes (2038)

The Care Routes were created to challenge the idea that journeys are always linear. Instead of designing only around the typical home-to-work commute, these routes recognised that many journeys are shaped by care, responsibility, and multiple stops throughout the day. They responded to women’s mobility as something complex and layered, including caregiving, errands, school runs, work, and returning home. This prototype helped us expand the project beyond the bus stop itself, showing how a future transport system could support the realities of everyday mobility.

Together, these artefacts helped us build a future grounded on lived experience by those who wait. Each prototype added another layer to the world, policy, people, media, recognition, and mobility. They allowed us to move from a single design concept to a wider system, where Bus Havens became part of a larger conversation about safety and who the city is designed to support.

Reflecting on the Future We Built

Testing the Future: Tensions and Critiques

Our world went through several rounds of critique and changed a lot over the weeks. We first created a future called LumiNation, which focused on light, visibility, and rewarding good deeds in public space. However, feedback helped us realise that this system could easily become controlling or open to abuse. It raised questions around who decides what counts as “good” behaviour, and whether safety was becoming another form of surveillance.

This pushed us back to the drawing board. Instead of starting with technology, we narrowed the project towards urban mobility and the bus stop as a space. But this world also brought new tensions. Focusing on specific areas like Peckham made us question whether we were accidentally framing certain places or communities as problems to be fixed.

This became an important learning point. Bus Havens could not be presented as a perfect solution. They had to hold the tensions of the world around and who gets to define safety. Through critique, we learned that speculative design is not about creating a flawless future, but about prvocations and contradictions already present today.

What This Process Taught Me

This process taught me a lot about feminist futures and my role as a designer. Coming from a business and marketing background, I was used to thinking about what would create the most monetary value. I had not always been taught to sit with the deeper “why” behind a problem, or to question who benefits from a design and who might be left out.

This project shifted that for me. It made me reflect not only as a designer, but also as a woman who has experienced discomfort, fear, and alertness while waiting in public spaces, especially at night. The issue no longer felt abstract. It became personal, but also in a way collective. I realised that many small behaviours women do every day, such as staying aware, planning routes, or holding their phone tightly, are often treated as normal when they should be questioned.

Working through feminist futures helped me understand that designing for women is not about creating something only for women. It is about starting from lived experiences that are often overlooked and using them to create more caring spaces for everyone. A bus stop designed with women’s safety, comfort, and emotional experience in mind can also support those who has ever felt vulnerable while waiting. For me, this project showed that design can do more than solve problems. It can ask better questions about the kind of city we want to live in.

Conclusion

By the end of this project, the bus stop felt like more than a place to catch a bus. It became a way to think about how much care is missing from everyday spaces. Waiting is usually ignored because it seems ordinary, but for many people, it is the moment where the city either supports them or leaves them to manage alone.

Bus Havens helped us imagine what could change if waiting was taken seriously. Not through bigger technology or more control, but through small things that shape how a space feels. The city should not make people feel forgotten while they wait.

Reference list

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Auger, J. (2013) ‘Speculative design: crafting the speculation’, Digital Creativity, 24(1), pp. 11–35.

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020) Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Prado de O. Martins, L. (2014) ‘Privilege and Oppression: Towards a Feminist Speculative Design’, DRS Biennial Conference Series: Design’s Big Debates, Umeå, Sweden, 16–19 June.

Samana, S. (2024) A futures cone model, used in speculative design [illustration]. In: Xiao, L. (2024) ‘What is speculative design?’, Wix Studio Blog, 25 October. Updated 29 April 2025. Available at: https://www.wix.com/studio/blog/speculative-design (Accessed: 13 May 2026).

Scheiner, J. and Holz-Rau, C. (2017) ‘Women’s complex daily lives: a gendered look at trip chaining and activity pattern entropy in Germany’, Transportation, 44, pp. 117–138. doi: 10.1007/s11116–015–9627–9.