Design aims to take a comprehensive view in creating value, product and services, as well as to help organizations create mechanisms to deliver and support them. However, very often design practitioners do not have an opportunity to consider the implications of a new service or product in a wider context (social, economic, political). This oversight limits our ability to make a significant impact on how we design and create our collective future.
The goal of this workshop is to demonstrate how futures studies (also known as foresight) can help design practitioners (i) imagine possible future worlds, (ii) create services/products in the contexts of those worlds (iii) understand systemic implications based on the relationship between the service/product and the future world. During this workshop we will introduce some of the basic concepts of future studies and drawing from the decades of research in this field, teach and practice specific futures methods. These methods will then combined with more traditional design tools (e.g. design research, journey mapping, rapid prototyping etc.) to demonstrate how futures can empower design to deal with larger and longer-term change.
Workshop in collaboration with Sandjar Kozubaev.