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In the Design Thinking session, you designed and prototyped a solution for the design challenge to foster social and emotional well-being for students at your school. In this module you will engage with '''futures thinking'''. Have you ever heard of it? You might be wondering: what is futures thinking and how is it related to design thinking? What are their main differences and how do they complement one another?<br><br>
Futures thinking (or futures design) is a discipline, a mindset, that aims at exploring and speculating about potential futures, to help us reflect about the long term and societal implications of our actions. While engaging with futures thinking, the goal is not to predict what will happen, but to explore what might happen to identify desirable and undesirable outcomes, so we can inform our current practices and actions. The main rationale of futures thinking is that the future is not something that happens to us, but it is something that we can co-shape. That is why we say “‘futureS”’ "futureS" and not “‘future’,” "future" because there are many possibilities ahead of us, and it depends on our actions how those future(s) will unfold.<br><br>
Futures thinking is not new, and it has been around for decades. What we have observed is that, increasingly, the ethos of futures thinking is becoming relevant and part of the DNA of design in general, and design thinking in particular. Design has evolved from a user centric and solution-oriented discipline, towards a more systemic and responsible approach that acknowledges the interconnectedness of our world, and the need to consider long-term and ethical implications of our design process. <br><br>
# '''Design to embrace plurality and uncertainty:''' embrace a plurality of perspectives and, very importantly, a plurality of futures. Although we navigate ambiguous and uncertain challenges, we have agency to co-shape what’s ahead of us, acknowledging that we can influence the range of options we can cocreate.
# '''Move beyond user centered design:''' users are important but let’s think about the interconnected impacts of our actions, extending our temporal horizons, thinking of future generations, voices that are often not included in very relevant societal discussions.
At DesignLab, we have our own approach to engage communities with futures thinking, called Responsible Futuring. We call it our approach to “‘co"co-shape the futures we want to live in’”in".
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