Envisioning the Future

What will the world look like in five, ten or even fifty years? Design is by nature a future oriented activity. This course offers a better understanding of how design changes the world in very material ways. Open your eyes, explore different ways of thinking, and create your own vision of the future.

Every design process starts with an understanding of what the future is going to be like for a particular object, service or environment. Who is going to be the future user that will use what we make, where are they going to use it and how?

This course is about developing the knowledge and skills required to conceptualise the future as a designer. To see the links between practice and ideas. It’s about combining research and creativity.

Consider different ways to think about the future by exploring things like pop culture and science fiction. Work with futuring techniques taken from different disciplines, like road mapping for businesses, horizon scanning, design fiction, and speculative design. Explore the ethical, social, cultural, and political aspects of design, especially when it comes to technologies.

This course will provide a set of tools to help think about and create a rich image of the future which can be applied to Design Project 3 and beyond.

Project by Eva van Eck, Matthijs de Koning, Dario Sapienza and Jia Wang. Photo by Guus Schoonewille.

Course Coordinator's perspective

“I hope this course motivates students to really think about how different ideas of the future percolate and circulate in culture and design practice, to give them a nice palate of ideas and a vocabulary to talk about these things. We want to give students something that is both useful and inspiring.”

Roy Bendor