If all design is future-making, how can we better prepare designers to intentionally imagine, discuss, and create the world we want to see?

The Envisioning Futures workshop combines worldbuilding prompts and foresight frameworks with design principles to guide participants in creating an artifact from a future scenario that they imagine.

In the workshop, we establish the idea that there is not just one inevitable future. There are many probable, plausible, and possible futures. Designers Dunne & Raby describe the Probable as where most designers operate on a day-to-day basis. In the workshop, we strive to expand out into the Possible.

We look at speculative scenarios and imagine the history, physical environment, people, and material culture of that place. 

I share speculative design projects that are from different parts of the world to help expose participants to different perspectives about the future and different ways that design can be used to create narratives.

The Scenario Generator helps create context for an imagined future. In the same way that artifacts in a museum can tell us something about history, speculative design objects act as artifacts from a future. 

A poster must capture someone’s attention and communicate quickly. For the purposes of the workshop, it’s also important that the poster have a narrative quality. It needs to tell us something about the imagined scenario in the same way that an object in a museum or a prop in a movie can tell a story.

The final step of the workshop is an activity that involves actually designing a poster that functions as an artifact. Participants can take the ideas they produced using the scenario generator to develop ideas for their poster. 

I tested the workshop with a group of GD MFA students and then again with a Graphic Design 1 class that I taught last semester. Those tests helped me understand what exercises worked well and what didn’t, as well as what resonated with people or what needed more clarification.

Students used the opportunity to reflect on current issues that are important to them to extrapolate their vision of the future. I asked participants to share the most enjoyable parts of the experience. In other assignments, I have found design students often resent requirements to create their own content. In the workshop, students enjoyed developing the context for their design and then generating ideas for what to include on their poster.