Systemic changes are happening all around us and the need for preparedness for an uncertain future has never been more salient. While operational plans and strategy are critical, psychological preparedness is just as important. Preparedness is anticipating certain kinds of events and outcomes tied to those events. Let’s look at environmental issues. For example, every …
Futures work is a branch of design that seeks to translate trends, ideas, and imagination based on data into visions of where we might go. What happens when we bring psychologists along? The popular deployment of generative AI tools has put ‘futures thinking’ into our collective imagination front and centre. We humans love futures thinking …
Far from being messy, the meta middle is the space we are in where we can see the disruption coming and aren’t sure where we need to steer things so we navigate through it. The Messy Middle is a phrase used to describe the part of a project where we’re prone to get lost, mess …
Two simple words can make the difference between seeing something that just “is” to something that could be almost anything we want. Noema Magazine recently published an article from Yakov Feygin and Nils Gilman entitled The Designer Economy. Feygin and Gilman are not traditional designers looking at products and services, they are business writers and …
The AI Revolution is here. How we can adapt our nervous systems to deal with the pace and scope of the changes around us? Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter from The Atlantic is among the best venues for insights into the cultural issues associated with technology. Warzel’s astute observations and commentary on not just what …
Strategic Foresight can do more than help us to see what might come, it can help us to live better lives today. Using the example of well-being we look at how design with foresight can help us create a better present while shaping our preferred future. What if we could live in the future today? …
At the time of this writing, Russia has just invaded Ukraine, protesters have just left a 3-week occupation of the Canadian capital, and we’re leaving the most devastating wave of COVID. Foresight and futures work was unhelpful in all cases and that says a lot about the field and the humans using it. The Russian …
While this title is ridiculous, the practice of futures work is not and is more important than ever to support the kind of innovation we need for the planet. Unfortunately, too many futurists seem to be content to make broad proclamations instead of demonstrating their value. Anytime you see a title that says “The Future …
Only by understanding our past can we properly design for a future that’s different from it. When we think about the past there’s a tendency toward thinking about things that are often unpleasant, even old-fashioned. Future-thinking is exciting, filled with possibility, and is characterized more by optimism, technology, and ‘shiny things’ at its most cartoonish. …
Design is far too important not to be shared and made as accessible as possible as our future literally depends on it. Design is not a luxury. Design is what will shape our world to come. Our ‘next’ will be designed by us and those design choices will shape who benefits, how, and what influence …
