Design Futures

This course is a theme course of DfI theme 2: Design for Emerging Sustainable Futures. Design is a future-oriented discipline focused on innovation and change. However, the ideas, tools and practices of design do not always create better futures for all, and sometimes end up promoting unsustainable, undemocratic or inequitable solutions. The central questions raised in this course, therefore, consider (1) how design is currently implicated in future-making processes, and (2) how design can open up regenerative, restorative, and transformative practices.

The course is organized around 4 themes: uncertainty (how designers address unknown futures), plurality (how designers open up alternative future possibilities), imagination (how designers make sense of the future), and politics (how designers intervene in material debates about the future). Lectures will also include state-of-the-art explorations of emerging technologies such as AI, robotics, and smart materials.

The course aims to develop students’ futures literacy – their capacity to identify the systemic conditions, actors and levers that enable action on future possibilities – by introducing students to debates about the future-making capacity of design and by exploring popular futuring tools such as scenario analysis, causal layer analysis, and the futures wheel. Course content will be relevant for other DfI theme courses.

The final assignment in the course (for 100% of the grade) is to re-design one or more everyday objects or services according to the themes discussed in class, and by using the futuring methods practiced during self-study.

The deliverable is a short report that will illustrate the decisions made and connect them explicitly to course material.

The assignment is individual.