Designing Ethical and Inclusive Futures Speculation, and Reflection

In this workshop, we introduce the future scenario game “The Thing from the Future” (Candy & Watson 2015) in a version tailored for the engineering and product design community. We combine it with a method we call “Spaces of Opportunities”, which has proven to be supportive for collaborative design education practices and for collaboration between academia and industry.
Over the past two years we have explored and worked with many variations of “The Thing from the Future”. This includes (but is not an exhaustive list) a) designing smart textiles without the use of wires, b) development of a new BA education in design and business, c) designing future business models and ways of consuming with NFC-tags and AI, d) systems thinking in design education. The participants were from industry, research projects, management, students and educators. We have refined and experimented with ways of tailoring the method to work across different disciplines and expertises. In our explorations we have discovered that “The Thing from the Future” works very well when combined with “Spaces of Opportunity”, which basically is a matrix that are tailored to the subject in question, and which helps the participants analyse the scenario and articulate it.
The aim of the workshop is therefore to introduce the E&PDE community to “The Thing from the Future” and how it works in combination with “Spaces of Opportunity”. The goal is to show how it can support creating synergies between participants and speculative thinking about the future (Dunne & Raby, 2013). We wish to create awareness of how to create a good synergy between disciplines and/or establishing a strong foundation for interdisciplinary collaborations.
The significance of this workshop is that it introduces a hands-on, playful and serious gamification method that can be adapted to different contexts with different participants from academia, education and/or industry. Tailored in the right way, our experience is that it facilitates any group of participants to work towards a common goal and eventually establish communities of practice (Wenger, 1999).
The workshop will be relevant for all participants at the E&PDE conference, as the participants will tailor the method to their own purpose. Thus, it is relevant for all disciplines and levels within education of product and engineering design.
Summing up it is a very useful method for addressing wicked problems, systems thinking and speculative thinking in R&D, for creating communities of practice, and for working with group dynamics in education and between academia and industry.