Future Scouting® is a simplified approach to speculative design with a focus on core values, life-centred thinking, and inclusivity, with the purpose to empower others with future thinking skills.
Contact: info@futurescouting.com.au
Much of the world’s design thinking is focused on profit-driven projects, creating a future world limited by this focus, encouraging people to buy stuff and do things that are killing the planet, hurting animals, and exploiting people in poverty.
If we invest even just a small amount of design focus on values-driven projects, then might we create a more harmonised and kinder future world?
Future Scouting® aims to make values-driven futures design more ubiquitous, accessible, and intgerative by simplifying futures tools and processes.
Founder
Future Scouting® is an independent project by Damien Lutz for advancing design toward a more long-term thinking and regenerative force. See also:
“The actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on the beliefs people hold about what sorts of alternatives are viable.”
Eric Olin Wright—American sociologist and educator
Practices
Speculative design
Speculative design combines design thinking methods with the story-telling and future-world-building techniques of speculative fiction to produce prototypes of future products or experiences. These fantastic artefacts may be in the form of a physical or digital product, video, documentary, book, manual, website, sculpture or something else. Their purpose is to generate discussion, debate, and awareness beyond projected or plausible futures, so that people imagine and articulate their preferred futures.
Life-centred design
Life-centred design (also known as ‘environment-centred design’ and ‘planet-centred design’) expands our mindset from purely human-centred creation to include consideration of sustainable, environmental, and social solutions.
Principles
Accessible
Speculative and futures tools are scattered far and wide, and instructions can be heavy in new terminology and academic language. Future Scouting® aims to condense designing futures into clear, simplified, and engaging process flows to make learning how to save the world fun.
Values-driven
Speculative design took form in the early 1990s as designers questioned their role in consumerism’s impact on the planet and began to consider how to align design with values. Future Scouting® maintains the spirit of speculative design’s origins by grounding the method in designing for core values over profit by encouraging designers to know their own values.
To assist in designing with values, assumptions and bias kept in mind, Future Scouting® has created the Futures Pixel.
Inclusive
There are at least 64 genders, 46 types of sexuality, over 3800 different cultures, more than 6900 languages, and at least 7 types of disabilities! The users of our products can be any combination of these, so we need to consider Inclusive Design.
Future scouting® challenges us to consider how our designs might include people who experience life differently from ourselves, or who are often not included or marginalized by mass design.
Life-centred
The evolution of life-centred design (also known as ‘environment-centred design’ and ‘planet-centred design’) is expanding our mindset from purely human-centred creation to include consideration of sustainable economical, environmental, and social solutions.
Challenging
We all have established opinions and automatic responses — some we are unaware of — affecting our thinking and behaviours. These assumptions can influence our designs and negatively impact users and the environment.
Future Scouting® challenges us to know our assumptions and push our designs past our default perspectives.
Experimental
Future Scouting® encourages experimentation—evolve the tools, mix the methods, test with others, and re-share.