Design x Futures = Design Futures?
Exploring how design futures can help span our imagination gap — a field guide and the #OneLess Design Fellowship as case study
Over the past years extensive research has been dedicated in the fields of design and futures studies to the potential of speculation and anticipation to inform and incite change in the present tense. Yet, as David-Foster Wallace notes (and as have many other pointed over time), at a societal level we’re still failing to imagine and own visions that add up to the shifts needed to stay within our planetary boundaries.
It’s a crisis of imagination, not solutions, that we are faced with.
In this article I’m charting the contributions that the fields of design and futures studies can make to the process of tackling this imagination gap.
To exemplify the potential of design futures, I’ll use the #OneLess Design Fellowship as a case study. I co-designed and facilitated the fellowship in 2018 as part of the #OneLess campaign, which aims to rid London of single-use single plastic water bottles through creating the enabling conditions for refill, rather than throwaway behaviour.
More broadly, I am also putting a stake in the ground in articulating the emerging field of design futures as ways to develop and deploy prompts, artefacts and narratives to critically interrogate tomorrow’s societal debates today; as such, it is intentional from the outset in its pursuit of preferable futures and therefore social and environmental justice. The process of imagining the future is an active, values-laden social practice, which requires a layered approach to surface and challenge dominant patterns in our mental models.
But first, let’s recap — how did we get here?
Part 1: a design and futures field guide
Tributary sub-disciplines of design: Speculative Design, Design Fiction, Critical Design
The act of designing is in itself a process of bringing new ideas into form, of giving shape to hypothetical possibilities. With the advent of ‘designerly ways of knowing’ [1], the field of design has developed thinking and learning processes that enable people to deal with complex problems and uncertainty.
Elaborating on the concept of wicked problems as developed by Rittel & Webber [2] in regard to urban planning, Richard Buchanan crystallised the role of design as an integrative field which provides methods for problem definition and problem solution [3]. Coined as design thinking, his work depicted the potential of design to combine a deeper understanding of context through ethnographic methods, with the solutions-oriented bias of a design process. As Buchanan further notes, the subject matter of design is potentially ‘universal in scope’ as it can be applied to any area of human experience.
Over the past decades, a multitude of sub-fields have crystallised with this belief at their core — from tangible product and craft-based disciplines such as industrial design, to the more intangible realm of speculative design [4], design fiction [5, 6] or transition design [7].
As Dunne & Raby [4] suggest, “design can allow an individual to open windows on the future in order to better understand the present”. A more recent development has been the approach to design as a practice focused not on solving problems (and therefore outcome-oriented mindset) but asking “carefully crafted questions” (and therefore inquiry-oriented mindset), through the advent of design fiction, speculative design, and critical design.
The implications of this subtle but defining shift in purpose ripple out across different dimensions. Traditionally design has seen prototypes as ‘an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from’ [8]. However, the role of prototypes in inquiry-oriented processes is radically different; as coined by Bruce Sterling in an interview, “design fiction [sees] the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change”. The term ‘diegetic’, (from diegesis, to narrate), reasserts the relationship between the viewer and prototypes. As such, diegetic prototypes are props to help the viewer ‘suspend disbelief’ and explore the critical questions the corresponding fictional world and its prototypes are aiming to stir as reaction.
However, it’s hard to ignore the technological roots of the prototype as medium to convey ideas and visions about society. And perhaps this is why I still feel uncomfortable with their current use and process of mainstreaming into business and policy. Diegetic prototypes, as used in speculative design, design fiction and critical design have a built-in bias towards a technological, rather than a social inquiry.
Their affordances help us ask ‘what might be the impact of this technology?’, rather than ‘what might be the technological landscape that supports preferable societal visions?’.
This limits us as designers to exploring applications of technology, rather than implications. If, as a community of design practitioners, we want to be involved further upstream in the strategy, policy and governance domains, then we need to ask critical questions about our current practice of design-led speculation. By implications, I mean that we need to ask: Whose futures are we speculating about? Who are we marginalising or excluding through our speculations? What are the unintended consequences of our ‘critical’ and ‘speculative’ designs? What assumptions are we making about the world? How are we using our own power, privileges and agency?
As designers, we take pride in being the not just great at problem solving, but at problem framing. However, accepting the technological lens as dominant filter for our practice is considerably narrowing our sphere of concern.
Futures Studies
Central topic in the field of futures studies is the premise that by imagining different, alternative futures to the current business-as-usual scenario we stand a better chance of bringing them into being [9–12].
In contrast to speculative design and design fiction, futures methods have long been used in business and policy-making and are practices in industry and government as strategic foresight, an area of practice within the futures studies field [13]. Methods for imagining alternative future pathways emerged during the Cold War within the US military-industrial sector through organisations such as RAND or the Hudson Institute — themselves legacies of the World War II apparatus [14]. These methods diffused into other industrial sectors over time, most notably through initiatives such as the Royal Dutch Shell Scenarios [15] and the Oxford Scenarios Programme.
However, the ‘pragmatic foresight’ [13] Shell practice of scenarios has little to do with the transformative goal stated above. Its value proposition lies within actively managing current market conditions, supporting innovation management processes and therefore minimising risk to the current status quo. It provides links between corporate strategy, innovation, leadership, organisational learning, investment, marketing and communications, with the core assumption that the organisations engaging in strategic foresight will gain the capability of being ‘future fit’ and therefore gain a competitive advantage.
Strategic foresight and futures studies might share a suite of methods and tools, yet their enacted goals are inherently different: one is to preserve and reinforce the status quo, while the other is to inquire and actively explore alternatives to the status quo.
It is the latter goal and its associated methods and tools which are of interest to me. Much like the fields of design, futures studies is often portrayed as a capability exclusive to experts, while in fact a participatory approach is a core value for both fields; in both cases it builds on our innate human capability of (a) anticipating the future and (b) shaping our environment to respond to perceived threats and opportunities. Challenging the misconception that ‘professional experts’ are the only ones who can tackle long-term and large-scale problems, new tools are emerging to popularise and lower the barrier to entry to both design [16] and futures methods [17].
While scenarios are one method commonly used to help expand our ‘possibility space’[11] by encouraging speculation of multiple and widely varied alternative futures, recent developments in the field of futures studies have seen the proliferation of new methods that build on emergent systems properties and bridge the ‘experiential gulf’ [18] between abstract futures as explored by scenario planning and the reality of everyday life in the present. Candy maps this knowledge gap and advocates for an ‘experiential turn’ to enable people to experience alternative futures in the present tense, through immersive methods. One such approach is Ethnographic Experiential Futures or EXF [19], a ‘design-driven, hybrid approach to foresight aimed at increasing the accessibility, variety and depth of available images of the future’; it seeks to do so through the development of narratives, fictional artefacts from the future and experiential scenarios (that can be performed or enacted).
These methods do not and should not offer definitive answers as to how the future will look — instead, they are useful devices in enabling people to better understand the challenges we are faced with and spark reflection about implications at a personal, collective and societal levels.
Design x Futures = Design Futures?
The current state of play opens the possibility for these complementary approaches and methods from design and futures studies to be put to use in the context of exploring transformative change in line with the social and environmental challenges of our time. The use of design and futures methods to develop a prospective and systemic exploration of transformative change is an area of exploration which enables conversation about the paradigm shift required in the context of the values, ethics and societal norms.
I made the diagram above to build on Montgomery’s mapping of speculative fiction as I wanted to test the relationships between the different sub-disciplines across two axes — attitude towards strong sustainability and attitude towards change. While strong sustainability acknowledges that natural capital cannot be replaced by economic or social capital (and that they are nested systems), the transformative attitude to change axis implicitly requires a paradigm shift beyond the current socioeconomic system in order to stay within planetary boundaries.
Part 2: Design futures in practice —designing and facilitating the #OneLess Design Fellowship as a systemic intervention
The #OneLess campaign seeks to create a ‘refill revolution’ in London, transforming the city into a place where single-use bottled water is a thing of the past and where ‘refilling’ behaviour is the norm. We aim to create a systemic shift, working across a number of different leverage areas including policy, behaviour, design, infrastructure, business models, and values, in order to create significant, lasting change.
In 2018, one of the key activities was to design and facilitate a Design Fellowship, bringing together 17 multidisciplinary designers over a period of three months, which culminated with an exhibition as part of London Design Festival.
Why a Design Fellowship
From ideation challenges, open innovation processes, to hackathons and competitions, there are a myriad of formats for creatively tackling complex issues. However, without the necessary enabling conditions in which to thrive, ideas often inspire, but fail to create lasting change.
Our experience has shown that great ideas on their own are often not enough to create system level change. As such, the Fellowship was structured around personal and cohort development, building skills in systemic diagnosis and intervention, as well as building the buy in of the organisations and stakeholders required for broader change. The programme for the summer school, as well as the wider fellowship reflects this focus on people, mindsets and relationships, as well as on ideas, concepts and artefacts.
What we did
The designers worked alongside innovation, materials and behaviour change experts and responded to a set of challenges put forward by local authorities, venues, retailers, events (such as the Greater London Authority, King’s College London, the Emirates Football Stadium, the Natural History Museum, Lord’s Cricket Ground and ZSL London Zoo) who are struggling with the systemic barriers of eliminating single-use plastic water bottles. Myself and a number of mentors facilitated the fellows first through a process of systemic diagnosis using a range of methods from design, futures and systems practice.
In the design of the systemic diagnosis process, I weaved together a range of methods such as horizon scanning, Three Horizons, design ethnography, the Multi-level Perspective, the Iceberg Model, Nested Systems, Snappy Systems Mapping, Value Networks Mapping. This process led to a deeper understanding of the complex nature of the challenge at hand and served as the backbone for the following two and half months of design development and concept testing, which culminated in an exhibition as part of the London Design Festival.
I’m (still) in the process of writing up the detailed case study of the methods, facilitation tools and outputs and outcomes, but you can find a work in progress document here.
The map below charts the flow of the summer school, the challenge areas and the concepts and interventions that emerged.
What emerged
The concepts ranged from drinking water infrastructure interventions, through to campaign artefacts designed to ignite a behavioural shift away from single-use plastic water bottles. They aimed to help transport hubs, hotels, college campuses and pedestrian zones, as well as big events like open-air concerts and sporting events, go plastic-bottled water free.
Below you can find some of the concepts and artefacts developed — for more detail, follow this link.
What I learnt
When I set out to design the flow of the Fellowship, I knew that the balance between 1) the practical and implementation focus of of the stakeholders and 2) the need for transformative, rather than incremental concepts was key to the success of the programme.
However, I was also acutely aware that what often gets lost in these kinds of generative programmes is the focus on the mindset shift of the people involved. The designers involved were fluent in ‘traditional’ design and innovation processes; however, the Fellowship was not seeking to incubate ‘market-ready’ prototypes, nor to lead to new products or services. The aim of the Fellowship was on bridging the imagination gap between the pain points of the stakeholders and the scale of ambition and imagination needed to shift behaviour in a complex urban environment.
The #OneLess campaign ended up taking forward one of the concepts from the Fellowship, the London Wave (pictured above), running a targeted campaign that focuses on the tourism system in London over summer 2019. The Metro and Sky News ran a story about ‘a new proposal’ to change plastic water bottle messaging similar to graphic tobacco labelling (based on the Guerrilla Plastic messaging concept pictured above).
To me, this is a great example of what systemic ‘impact’ looks like — focusing on activating values, shifting mindsets, identifying leverage points and foregrounding adaption, rather than adoption, or direct uptake of ideas.
So what next?
Considerable work is needed to nurture a plurality of future imaginaries, as well as ways of seeing and imagining in order to tackle key sustainability challenges. This presents itself as a possibility space for the field of design futures — as both a disruptor of hegemonic futures and as a vehicle to hold a mirror for reflection on the present lock-in of dominant imaginaries.
I’m currently working on the following — if you’re interested to contribute to any of these (or have something else in mind), sign up here.
- A platform to open source design futures tools, methods and frameworks;
- A repository of concepts and artefacts that explore preferred futures;
- A (small) community of practice to deepen and develop our practice as design futures practitioners.
Nb. Part 1 of this article is based on the following journal article:
Future Tense: Harnessing Design Futures Methods to Facilitate Young People’s Exploration of Transformative Change for Sustainability C Angheloiu, L Sheldrick, M Tennant, G Chaudhuri — World Futures Review, 2019
References
[1] Cross, Nigel. 1982. “Designerly Ways of Knowing.” Design Studies 3 (4): 221–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/0142-694X(82)90040-0.
[2] Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. 1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (2): 155–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730.
[3] Buchanan, Richard. 1992. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” Design Issues 8 (2): 5–21.
[4] Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. 2013a. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. The MIT Press.
[5] Lindley, Joseph, and Paul Coulton. 2015. “Back to the Future : 10 Years of Design Fiction.” In British HCI ’15 Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference :, 210–11. New York: ACM.
[6] Sterling, Bruce. 2005. Shaping Things. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
[7] Irwin, Terry. 2015. “Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research.” Design and Culture 7 (2): 229–46.
[8] Blackwell, Amy Hackney, and Elizabeth Manar. 2015. “Prototype.” In UXL Encyclopedia of Science, 3rd ed. Science in Context. UXL.
[9] Dator, James A. 2002. Advancing Futures: Futures Studies in Higher Education. Westport, Conn: Praeger.
[10] Fuller, Ted. 2016. “Anxious Relationships: The Unmarked Futures for Post-Normal Scenarios in Anticipatory Systems.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 124 (December).
[11] Miller, Riel. 2006. “Futures Studies, Scenarios, and the ‘Possibility-Space’ Approach.” In Think Scenarios, Rethink Education, by OECD, 93–105. OECD Publishing.
[12] Rosen, Robert, Judith Rosen, and John J. Kineman. 2012. Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations: 1. 2nd ed. 2012 edition. New York: Springer.
[13] Voros, Joseph. 2001. “A Primer on Futures Studies, Foresight and the Use of Scenarios.” Foresight Bulletin 6.
[14] Bell, Wendell. 1998. “Making People Responsible: The Possible, the Probable, and the Preferable.” American Behavioral Scientist 42 (3): 323–39.
[15] Schoemaker, Paul J.H., and Cornelius A.J.M. van der Heijden. 1992. “Integrating Scenarios into Strategic Planning at Royal Dutch/Shell.” Planning Review 20 (3): 41–46.
[16] Manzini, Ezio, and Rachel Coad. 2015. Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
[17] Montgomery, Elliott P., and Chris Woebken. 2016. Extrapolation Factory — Operator’s Manual: Publication Version 1.0 — Includes 11 Futures Modeling Tools. Bilingual edition. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
[18] Candy, Stuart. 2010. “The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios.” University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
[19] Candy, Stuart, and Kelly Kornet. 2017. A Field Guide to Ethnographic Experiential Futures.
