Future Design: Are We Ready to Become Time Rebels?

A creative and quirky yet effective method to tackle worthwhile issues, to start change movements and to create a world fit for future generations.

What is Future Design?

Future Design, a branch of Futures Thinking (also called Futures Studies or Futurology), can be considered as a method to help us retrain our brains to go beyond polarizing debates and alarmist rhetoric to think of the long view and trade shortsightedness for long-term thinking. Based on original theoretical options, Future Design addresses in an operational way the following challenging question: What types of social systems are necessary if we are to leave sustainable natural environments and societies for future generations?

Flirting with existential philosophical themes and harboring the seeds for potential human development, Future Design explores and works through our capacity for imagination and thought.

The idea of Future Design is rather simple: if there is no one to protect the interests of future generations, then designate people to “take on the role of future generations” and have them stand in for future generations.

Since we tend to focus on the present, and therefore forget that we are living in a world with ancestors preceding and descendants succeeding us, and in order to counter-balance a common sense of urgency with the need to take the long term into account, Future Design opens a space to discuss how current decision-making will influence future generations, in fields such as, for example, the environment, urban management, forestry, water management, and finance.

Future Design has conceptualized a framework in which individuals take on the role of members of an imaginary future generation and engage in designing strategies that can be adopted by the present generation. In other words, through Future Design practice, the future is getting a voice in ingenious new ways.

The Future Design approach affects our thinking processes and it has yielded positive results in terms of encouraging long-term vision; the results are a marked tendency to extend time horizons beyond present-day concerns. Even though some scholars still debate as to whether Future Design is an art or science, empirical evidence has now demonstrated the effectiveness of adopting the future reference…