Wrapping up Future Studies

Over the past three days, students have explored how to apply a futures-thinking mindset to design. Through a combination of speculative and critical approaches, they learned to move beyond linear thinking and engage with complexity, uncertainty, and long-term transformation.

The module opened with a talk by Tobias Revell, who offered a practitioner’s perspective on future design and helped ground the upcoming activities within real-world approaches and reflections.

Led by Maria Elges and Rebecca Chau, the course provided frameworks and tools to map future scenarios, identify signals of change, and imagine alternative trajectories for our systems and services. As a final step, students applied their learnings to ongoing projects, experimenting with future-oriented strategies to provoke reflection and open up new design spaces.