Designing Futures
What if what we could imagine shaped the futures we wanted?
What if design helped people explore not just what is possible, but what is preferable, ethical, inclusive, and regenerative for all life?
Foresight, speculative design, and design fiction are three related practices for thinking seriously about the future.
- Foresight explores plausible futures using signals, trends, and systems thinking.
- Speculative design asks “what if?” — using scenarios and artefacts to provoke debate about where we’re headed.
- Design fiction makes those futures tangible through prototypes and stories that feel real enough to spark genuine conversation.
I combine futuring practices with Life-centred Design to explore how emerging technology, social shifts, and environmental change may impact people, business, and the planet—and how design can help steer us towards futures where all life can thrive.
Future Scouting©
To put futures thinking into practice, I created Future Scouting — my own speculative design framework for exploring the long-term impacts of emerging technology and innovation. It’s a process, guidebook, and game for aligning today’s design decisions with values that support a more sustainable and regenerative future.
It found its audience quickly — leading to invitations to speak, workshop, and teach at Speculative Futures Sydney, Echos School of Design, and others. The game has been played across Australia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, and received a Notable Design Education Initiative Award at the Core77 Design Awards 2021.
Teaching & Talking Futures
I’ve taken futures thinking into classrooms, organisations, and design communities — from guest lecturing at Echos School of Design on merging speculative and life-centred product design, to running Future Scouting workshops with designers at Vodafone exploring long-term connectivity scenarios, to facilitating sessions with futurists from around the world.
The goal is always the same: expand what designers think is possible, and give them tools to act on it.
Creating futuring tools
Alongside the Future Scouting framework, I’ve created a set of original tools and toolkits — including tools bundled with the Future Scouting guidebook — to help designers embed long-term, life-centred thinking into their everyday practice.
The Holistic Futures Wheel is my life-centred variation of the classic Futures Wheel — mapping the ripple effects of design decisions across people, ecosystems, and planetary systems. It’s been used at events including the UX Festival 2023, Germany and featured in Interface’s “Life-Centered Design” white paper.
The Futures Pixel is a tangible mindfulness tool—a foldable desk cube to keep you anchored to your values, assumptions, and the full lifecycle of your design, through the noise of fast-moving projects.
Sharing Future Scoutings
ALT-FUTRS—short for Alternate Futures—is an imaginary future store I created to showcase the design fictions produced by workshop and course participants. And the store is a design fiction in itself: a place where the futures people imagine become real enough to browse.
Writing Science Fiction
My futures design work didn’t start in a studio — it started in the worlds I was building as a science fiction writer. Writing two novels and an anthology, I found myself combining design thinking with world-building, interrogating how emerging technology shapes human behaviour and our relationship with the planet.
That process eventually mapped itself into the Future Scouting method. My cover design for The Lenz even picked up an ebook cover award along the way.
More to explore
Futuring Projects
Experimental futuring projects, including speculative design and design fiction.
Sci-Fi Artwork
Before AI, I created my own artwork using the photo-bashing technique I learned from UK artist Jonny Gray.
Interactive City
Linking the artwork I created for my novel, Amanojaku, I created a simple interactive experience to explore the future world.
Futuring Articles
Writing on foresight, speculative design, and design fiction.