A fun and practical step-by-step guide book to designing for the future with speculative design

For designers, product owners, and innovators

And anyone else wanting to experiment with future technologies and value-driven design

Drawing on the great work of futures and speculative design practitioners past and present, Future Scouting combines speculative design, life-centred design, product design and design thinking into one values-driven method to get you saving the world and back to the present well before the next pandemic.

Based on the Future Scouting game (Notable Design Education Initiative, Core77 Awards 2021), the guidebook includes downloadable worksheets to help you research, ideate, sketch, and storify as you learn how to:

– Catch a signal of emerging change
– Design a future invention
– Ideate a key scenario
– Extrude a hero and future world
– Compile your artefacts into a shareable prototype

This playful projection of what futures might exist—and how people may behave in them—will expand your peripheral creativity and deepen your awareness of human behaviour and psychology. Speculative design is exciting and humbling. It’s also a lot of fun.