Abstract:The limits of the modern lifestyle have been well established. What comes next? Design lacks a collective vision, or set of aspirational futures, to work towards. Increasing evidence suggests the transition towards a sustainable society must consist of sustainable lifestyles, designed and owned by individual people and communities. This research builds upon a set of lifestyle scenarios set in the year 2050, derived from the SPREAD 2050 and EUInnovatE projects, in order to explore the use of speculative methods to enable designers and future citizen-designers to reflect upon their practices and enact more radical change. The authors developed design workshops to examine the potential of speculative design applied in practice as a tool for systems change. The results have shown promise as a method for influencing a change in mindset amongst designers, and suggest opportunities for future research investigating how artefacts of change can create pathways towards a sustainable society.

The research starts from the premise that as the world is changing rapidly and in nonlinear ways, we are educating future practitioners for jobs and contexts that don’t yet exist. They instead need to be equipped to work for and with uncertainty to be able to grapple with the scale and pace of emergent change. The fields of design and futures studies bring significant insights to this challenge, including an array of methods, tools, and frameworks for prospective and systemic explorations of alternative futures. The emerging field of design futures can be framed as ways to develop and deploy prompts, artifacts, and narratives to critically interrogate tomorrow’s societal debates today; as such, it is intentional from the outset in its pursuit of preferable futures and therefore social and environmental justice. The process of imagining the future is an active, values-laden social practice, which requires a layered approach to a methodology to surface and challenge dominant patterns—making it an ideal approach for training the young people who will shape our future. This article reports on the design and delivery of participatory workshops that employ design futures methods to facilitate the exploration of transformative change for sustainability. These workshops were conducted with young people aged sixteen to seventeen to equip them to develop and explore alternative futures. The results suggest that design futures methods can facilitate participants from non-design backgrounds to develop alternative futures and artifacts that might sit within them. It was found that developing a sense of ownership was key to enabling participants to effectively reflect on alternative futures and their implications. Finally, the study highlights the potential for these methods to inform both design and sustainability pedagogy.