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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.
Experiment
Tools to download and experiment with. Evolve them and re-share!
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
The Maya Lenz 2019
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.
The Treaty of One Heart (2020)
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.
ESP — Embedded Smart Phone (2014)
ESP is a smart phone technology embedded in the user’s body. Taken as a tablet, nanobots would colonise the device on the skull.
Land-to-Hand Drone Network (2014)
A drone network connecting farmers directly to city consumers.
Designing alternate futures
6 speculative design projects from around the world
Learn
Book to broaden our ideas of what might be possible (affiliate links included).
The essential introduction to speculative design
A practical guide to exploring the future with story structure
A step-by-step guide to creating speculative futures and inventions
A step-by-step guide to practising speculative design for business
Learn
A step-by-step guide to practising speculative design
Designing Futures is a Future Studies project by UX Designer/sci-fi author Damien Lutz.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash