World Futures Review

This academic paper presents a case study exploring the significance and utility of an experiential futures scenario in addressing wicked problems and taboo topics. By illustrating both the “how” and “why,” this study demonstrates the effectiveness of experiential futures methods in tackling complex issues. It also provides insights into experiential futures’ potential for fostering understanding and dialogue around emotionally charged subjects that are often deeply ingrained in trauma and shaped by beliefs and assumptions. Set in 2052, this experiential workshop presents a futures scenario centered on Clear River Universal High School’s Social-Emotional Xcellence (S.E.X) curriculum, designed to show a long-term narrative of what a sex education curriculum 30 years from now might look like. It investigates a future world in which shame associated with sex, intimacy, and relationships has been eradicated, ushering in an era of openness and acceptance. The purpose of this case study, informed by multiple workshop iterations since 2022, is to leverage futures design methodologies as a platform for facilitating difficult conversations. In the domain of sex and intimacy, the experiential futures method displayed its potential to identify present-day strategies for addressing and discussing traditionally taboo topics. It suggests that by using transition design as a tool, other challenging domains could also be discussed, moving toward more equitable and open dialogues on other sensitive subjects, and enabling in-depth exploration of complex issues while ensuring discussions remain accessible and comfortable for all involved. To explore the topic of sex and intimacy, the authors mapped the wicked problem - delineating the intricate web of societal challenges related to the topic, and then articulated the social relations, diverse perspectives, and interests shaping the discourse on sex education. As it is set in a relatable “high school” environment, the workshop serves as a tangible example of envisioning a future where shame is eradicated and provocative topics are surfaced. Methods and frameworks experimented with in this workshop include: Systematic Inventive Thinking, Transition Design process, Sci-Fi Prototyping, Systems Prototyping, Ethnographic Experiential Futures, and others. This case study bridges the gap between speculative futures and current societal constraints, paving the way for more inclusive and constructive conversations about sensitive themes, and contributing significantly to the discourse on futures thinking, design, and futures-making.

In today’s world, both real and fictional realms (from hostile architecture to dystopian movies, literature or video games) are saturated with dystopian themes, influencing perceptions and societal structures profoundly (Zaidi 2022). The Tomorrow Times, a speculative newspaper of the future focused on hopeful news, asserts that exposure to positive narratives cultivates optimism and belief in constructive possibilities. It aims to translate these visions into impactful stories that inspire collective imagination and drive societal change. Concerns raised by authors like Toni Morrison (1996) and Geoff Mulgan (2020) about the lack of imagination in Western societies is what drives The Tomorrow Times goal of converting hopeful visions into compelling narratives. Through meticulous curation, it goes beyond mere imagination, offering visual and textual content that motivates individuals to actively shape a better future. In a context of fears surrounding these technologies, often associated with deepfakes and misinformation, The Tomorrow Times redefines AI as a tool for envisioning alternatives to despair. While acknowledging risks, it showcases AI’s potential through thoughtful curation to challenge negative narratives and foster constructive outcomes. Guided by humanitarian values and a Protopian Framework (Bielskyte et al. 2021), The Tomorrow Times prioritizes inclusivity, specificity, and plausibility. Inclusivity ensures diverse voices are heard, specificity adds depth to narratives, and plausibility balances reality with imaginative potential. These principles not only shape the project’s narrative approach but also offer insights for crafting stories that inspire hope and drive positive societal transformation. As The Tomorrow Times evolves, it stands against prevailing dystopian narratives, advocating for societal change, embracing diversity, and harnessing AI to explore imaginative futures. By inviting active participation in envisioning and realizing a brighter world, The Tomorrow Times encourages collective reimagination beyond current constraints.

Futuring methods and tools contribute to societal transitions by supporting the co-articulation and exploration of futures. In this paper, we argue that navigating societal transitions can benefit from engaging communities in uncovering and embracing emerging frictions in their contexts. We advocate for exploring approaches not only for challenging dominant visions but also for fostering value pluralism by creating space for diverse perspectives and alternatives. Inspired by open-source and commons-based technology practices, we analyze a self-developed futuring tool to reflect on how frictions can contribute to the reflection and development of visions for transitions. By reflecting on our experiences in urban transformation and the co-design of futuring tools, we provide a framework for enhancing community involvement and contextualizing knowledge through frictions. We identify three key lessons for practitioners and researchers: (1) frictions offer potential for co-producing flexible transition pathways with communities; (2) the articulation of frictions calls for different modes of engagement and expression; and (3) developing frictional future visions requires a balance of openness and structure. This paper offers insights into the limitations of current futuring practices and opportunities for their improvement, advocating for a shift toward more friction-oriented futuring methods.

Researchers often seek to enable sustainability transitions by helping new technologies or practices influence and change society in deep and transformative ways. There are inherent tensions in these ambitions, but they remain underexplored in the literature and practical experiences of our encounters with these tensions are similarly underdiscussed. This paper shares reflections and insights from a transdisciplinary project in Australia which explored how a more deliberate and critically reflexive approach to research could be pursued to enable a transition toward an algal bioeconomy. Presenting the project as a case study, we highlight how issues of place, materiality, aesthetics, and history can influence the role of research in socio-technical transitions in subtle and often unacknowledged ways. In the context of a nascent and contested bioeconomic vision for Australia, we contend that there is a need for researchers to challenge themselves with speculative, normative and plausible transition design projects, to build our collective capacity for deliberate and critical engagement in the futures that we pursue, or participate in, through our work. Specific practices that might help are raised and enabling conditions, such as a gap in the structure of Australia’s National Innovation System, are addressed in the discussion. In the face of these needs, challenges and opportunities, we conclude that a ‘systems weaver’ modality can offer clarity, agency and understanding to researchers and practitioners about the potential of their work and their role in systems change.

This work builds on the conceptualisation of everyday life as the basic context for social transitions, where collective imagination is formed through performance and re-enactments of routines and relations. Routines reproduce norms by repeating certain actions over time. For this reason everyday life can be considered a primary terrain for social changes, as affecting everyday norms means disrupting a larger structured reality. Therefore, for radical imaginaries to gain momentum, we ought to better understand how to break down and disrupt routines. This paper contributes to the field of transition design with an experiential technique that, by interjecting into daily rhythms, aims at cultivating reflexivity, problematising the present and opening for alternatives. Recognising rhythms as the “visible moving parts” behind the larger machine at play in our society, I combine rhythm-analysis and transformative practices, with a futuring approach. I conducted an auto-ethnographic experiment where I intervened on and slowed down my daily rhythms to explore those naturalized routines to investigate the normative system driving my mundane daily actions. Slowing down mundane activities translated into redesigning material arrangements and social practices, which in turns affects, questions and transforms the underlying values and mindsets inscribed within daily routines. This work shows that disrupting rhythms fosters different ways of repeating, helping reshape people’s images of the future.

Transition Design recognises that shifting complex systems towards sustainability and social justice inevitably requires multiple interventions across differing scales and time horizons. Theory of Change is a key element of this, helping transition designers envision, and create pathways to, preferred futures. Much of the Transition Design literature focuses on the transformational power of everyday choices and local-scale community movements, whilst recognising the importance of interconnections between different scales. This requires designers to develop Theories of Change that combine micro-scale changes able to catalyze broader system transitions, with supportive meso-level and macro environments that can sustain micro-scale initiatives. Regenerative agriculture has risen to prominence in several parts of the world in recent decades as a more sustainable approach to farming. Supporting uptake of regenerative agriculture requires a bridging of scales that transition designers can contribute to. While many farming decisions are undertaken individually and enacted at a local farm scale, they are influenced by systems that operate at national or global scales, such as markets, supply chains and regulations, which may have unique local or regional expressions. This tension is reflected in attempts to define regenerative agriculture, which can tend towards either individualistic approaches based around specific practices and farmer mindsets or systemic approaches that emphasise the need for holistic, global-scale changes to our agricultural systems. This article reports on an Australian case study involving ten diverse working groups that helped to inform a Theory of Change for transitioning agriculture to regenerative, equitable, and just futures. The insights generated from working with transition initiatives related to agriculture demonstrate the value of existing frameworks such as Multi-Level Perspective, while also highlighting the importance of the meso scale as an opportunity area in this context and the need to consider scale in a physical and geographical sense within Transition Design frameworks and practices.

As a futures practitioner, visionary, and friend, the role of the futurist is ever expanding. Not only are futurists called to rigorous futures understanding and implementation, but also to the role of guide and shepherd. Futures and foresight practitioners are provided unique opportunities to sit with the humans before them–the humans whose futures are being born and the futures that are dying. The ability to stand as a container for individuals and systems as they wrestle with the tension of change and transition is needed more than ever. Individual and collective trauma and loss on both the micro and macro levels prohibit and impede the work of transition, thus necessitating new technologies. In order to materialize those new futures, there are times that first require the hospicing, vigiling, and composting of visions and expectations. To do this, to bring others alongside and usher in and materialize the future together, futurists must consider stretching their skillbase, toolkits, and capacity. This article suggests a new framework as well as next steps in the development for a theory of change around transitional processing.

Too often the discussion of long-term societal change is situated in the context of today’s values and worldviews. Yet research from the World Values Survey and other sources suggest that there are discernable patterns in how values and worldviews are changing. Bringing that knowledge into our discussion and research about long-term societal change could help open up and shift the conversation to help see possibilities different from today. Additionally, we know from systems thinking that a key lever of systems change is influencing the paradigm -- i.e., the values and worldviews – of the system. This paper will explore the potentially pivotal role of values in worldviews in a proposed societal transition to “after capitalism – a new socioeconomic operating system that succeeds capitalism.

The contribution of this paper is a speculative model of future material wellbeing grounded in the theory of recognition. I explore wellbeing through Honneth’s (2012) concept of recognition, which emphasises how reciprocal social interactions contribute to the ethical development of individuals, promoting social justice and individual and collective wellbeing. Material wellbeing is discussed as a compound of life-qualities derived from conditions granted in the public sphere. The model evokes critical questions about existing social justice and economic systems, which may not make sense in transitions to sustainable societies; and renders possible futures in a trajectory of material wellbeing in relation to social justice. I narrate a fictional story containing familiar norms and interpretations of social setups and relate these as life-qualities elemental to the material wellbeing of future societies. In essence, I sketch an imagined social futures context, the reality of which would require governance, policies, laws, and economic distribution alternatives to today’s. My starting point is to challenge the visionary space of future sustainable societies, with a looser grip of markets-dependencies and utility-maximisation on our beliefs and attitudes, and where other possible worlds may arise from recognition and reciprocity that build social justice. The speculative model is a medium to raise questions about our relationships with reality and to project an alternative potential world, provoking us to think of our place within it. I use the sufficiency paradigm for revealing critical points in our present systems, while building on the paradigm’s ideas for reduced material outputs and increased social justice as a potential for sustainable societies.

My practice-based research is situated at the intersection of design and healthcare. My research investigates what design can do, on the topic of death, inside the hospital. The methodological approach includes a systematic review of literature, codesign with informed consent and making practice. Death does not exist, therefore it needed to be constructed. My research constructed death theoretically through studies of physiology, psychology, culture, philosophy, and the social practice of death. I used these critical theoretical frameworks, amongst others to develop a visual cartography of death, which I now call the Bioscope. The Bioscope was designed as a tool to facilitate conversations about death. Engaging with the Bioscope can make you familiar with death and transform your understanding of it. Most people die in the hospital. I took the Bioscope to the hospital to improve and evaluate it via codesign with palliative care practitioners. Through the two codesign workshops at the hospital, I investigated what a cartographic mapping of death should look like. Insights from the participants in the codesign workshops informed the content of the Bioscope. The Bioscope has been prototyped as a tapestry embroidered on fabric. The four-part backdrop of the Bioscope allows it to be assembled, displayed, and used in various formats. It has 40 text-based sites and 27 ornamental icons that provoke conversation. My practice remakes death so that it can be spoken about in a sophisticated manner. The Bioscope restyles the banal into something that is beautiful and approachable. The story of crafting the artefact embodies and reflects on my transition research and creative practice.

In this article, we reflect on how Transition Design can benefit from artistic practices and theories in the context of generating transformative futures. This reflection is empirically grounded in two recent workshops about (re)imagining “rurban” presents and futures in the Netherlands and involving the co-creation of methods by researchers and creative practitioners through transdisciplinary processes. Drawing on defamiliarization, a concept borrowed from art theory and practice, we show how arts-based methods allow us to “make strange” taken-for-granted meanings. Our analysis focuses on defamiliarizing disconnections in meaning and practice between the urban and rural, humans and nature. Such a process of defamiliarization, particularly when place-based and collaboratively undertaken, may generate affective encounters of refamiliarization with the more-than-human world. The knowledge that arises from such encounters allows for non-dominant voices to come to the fore and new meanings to emerge. We describe the knowledge that is generated in these encounters as patchy and sticky. While not directly transferable, this knowledge can be analytically “glued” together as part of open-ended and situated design and meaning making processes, offering potential for wider transformations. By discussing this creative process, we want to draw attention to the significance of contextual specificity, value plurality, and transformative postures and mindsets for Transition Design and the achievement of sustainable and just futures.

In an age where technology reigns supreme, our daily existence is intricately woven with an abundance of choices, each bearing unforeseen societal repercussions. As an increasing number of such challenges arise, the responsibility also lies with design to contribute to a better quality of life holistically. One particularly intertwined issue within this landscape is that of privacy. Whether knowingly or unwittingly, we regularly disclose a significant amount of our information verbally, digitally, and physically, sometimes even through our silence when there is someone to listen to. This study investigates the de-familiarization of the concept of privacy by navigating through historical societal paradigms and languages across Spain and India. It further augments this exploration by scrutinising through the multifaceted prism of pluriversality, specifically examining and contrasting legal regulations from a Spanish and Indian culture point of view since 1900. The study draws on the Transition Design approach to create an insightful dialogue encompassing the comprehension of ‘Pluriversal Privacy,’ its associated challenges, and the prospects it holds for the future. Additionally, this article probes the nuanced gradients of privacy, collective imagination and design fiction to try to imagine future scenarios and proposes a participatory speculative artefact on fictions of pluriversal privacy thereby stating the need to start from people.

Designing for transitions involves envisioning more sustainable futures towards which designed interventions create ontological shifts towards new ways of being. This paper presents a reading of ontological design in the context of Transition Design, and emphasises key dimensions of practice to consider when imagining futures to inform transition – (im)materiality, directionality, intentionality, temporality, contextuality, pluriversality and relationality. Positioning transition-oriented futuring as a critical futures practice highlights its goals of deconstructing defutural ontologies and reconstructing them in ways that bring forth more sustainable forms of living. Ontological design presents an underlooked, but highly relevant conceptualisation of design to inform transition – revealing design’s profound role in world-shaping and future-making. By engaging with its concepts in transition-oriented futuring, this paper seeks to put ontological design further into conversation within the growing field of design futures, which has overlooked the possible contributions of design theory in how we approach futuring. Recognising the structured nature of unsustainability, ontological design highlights Transition Design as the redirection of our current systems and practices towards configurations that better enable the imagining and materialising of alternative futures.

The EU Policy Lab is experimenting with speculative design as a tool to support innovative policy making. The context and process of the experiment are described including some of its preliminary results. The futures artefacts clearly support futures literacy and co-creation processes, both with citizens as well as policymakers. At the same time more opportunities can be explored reaching deliberative democracy and concrete outcomes in the policy creation process.