Designing Futures

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Designing Futures

Much of the planet’s design thinking is enslaved to the consumer machine, encouraging people to buy stuff and do things that are killing the planet, hurting animals, and exploiting people in poverty.

Designing Futures aims to inspire designers, writers and futurists to make time to experiment for projects that align with their own values-driven interests to design futures they believe in.

“The actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on the beliefs people hold about what sorts of alternatives are viable.”

Eric Olin Wright
American sociologist and educator, specializing in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism

Align

Know your values

Experiment

Play with design

Explore

Get inspired

Align with your values

Taking time to get to know your core values aligns what you think is important with what is actually important to you on a personal level.

Once you know your values, you can use them to guide your behaviours, decisions, and actions. You’ll know what to stand for in life and what to champion in any design process.

You can simply pick your top 10 from the list below, or go deeper with exercises that reveal your personal core values using these values discovery activities by CEO Sage.

Download value list

Values discovery

Align with your values

Taking time to get to know your core values aligns what you think is important with what is actually important to you on a personal level.

Once you know your values, you can use them to guide your behaviours, decisions, and actions. You’ll know what to stand for in life and what to champion in any design process.

You can simply pick your top 10 from the list below, or go deeper with exercises that reveal your personal core values using these values discovery activities by CEO Sage.

Download value list

Values discovery

Experiment

Tools to download and experiment with. Evolve them and re-share!

Experimental tools

Team Design Game

Experiment

Tools to download and experiment with. Evolve them and re-share!

Experimental tools

Team Design Game

Explore

Speculative prototypes and projects to inspire you.

Design Fiction

Explore

Speculative prototypes and projects to inspire you.

Mixed Reality In-flight Passenger Kit

A fast prototype of a future Mixed Reality In-flight Passenger Kit

MR In-flight Kit

The Maya Lenz

What if every day you could see and interact with a version of the world you preferred— a unique view personalised for you according to what makes you happy—all with a few blinks and eye movements? The Maya Lenz from 2039 will show you more of what you want to see and less of what you don’t.

Maya Lenz

The Treaty of One Heart

The Treaty of One Heart was a semi-finalist in Futuring Peace 2020——a competition calling for designers and futurists to create speculative artefacts that evoked novel futures of how to better sustain peace—-run by the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and Design Futures Initiative.

One Heart Treaty

Fast inventions

Inventions from by the Future Scouting game from around the world.

Inventions

Designing alternate futures

6 speculative design projects from around the world

More prototypes