3132 research outputs found
Sort by
Making Futures Present: A postcard from the future clears up your vision of the horizon
Get PDFIs what’s over the horizon a bit blurry for you? The future presents a greater feeling of certainty when you hold a piece of it in your hands.
Making Futures Present is a 30-minute exploration of an experiential foresight and design thinking method that helps to review and rethink the future by co-creating multiple scenarios.
It is very tempting for us to turn our gaze away from the future when it looks blurry, seems unknowable, and feels menacing. However, strategic foresight is a practice of low-risk thought experiments to reflect on the capacity to manage complex and turbulent scenarios. Making Futures Present helps us to envision preferred futures via design fiction objects. As a result, participants increase their comfort level with uncertainty and take steps in the present toward the future that they want.
Making Futures Present was awarded the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner award from the School of International Futures in 2018. It was also awarded the Most Significant Futures Work by the Association of Professional Futurists in 2019. It has been adapted for high school students, seniors, artists, writers, journalists, and people who are in career transitions. In 2020 it was adapted for youth anti-vaping research with the University of Toronto School of Public Health and recreated as an online research tool called Nod from 2050 in 2021. Most recently, it was adapted again for anti-vaping training onsite at a high school in Toronto. The facilitation instructions will be available free via a Creative Commons license soon
A Call for Scaling Literacy
Get PDFScaling is a motif describing the proportionate growth of innovation. Over the past decade, scholars have adapted the original idea of scaling from business to differentiate different ways to scale that are more appropriate in the context of social innovation. Scaling is sometimes thought of as a panacea: it is the end result, purpose, or answer to what we are trying to achieve. However, scaling remains ill-defined in systems change: we do not have a commonly agreed-upon language for what we are scaling, where we are scaling, or how we are scaling change in social systems. Instead, systemic designers refer to a mix of jargon from (social) innovation, design, systemic change, and/or transition design. Although these fields share similar ambitions for scaling, we argue that systemic designers need advanced scaling strategies for systemic innovation. The complexity of issues addressed by systemic design requires a better understanding of how scaling systems change happens and demands building capabilities for designing for these different dimensions and directions of scale.
The context of the study is a Master-level course building the capacity designers need to understand when maturing systemic social innovations. Students demonstrated a richness in their scaling strategies distinguishing different dimensions and layers of scale. The current work unfolds dimensions of scaling and scaling strategies necessary for systemic scaling and elaborates upon a multi-level framework for scaling literacy. We conclude with a call for scaling literacy to further advance systemic design’s methodological practices and expand the capabilities and action repertoire of future generations of systemic designers
Crafting Systemic Design
Get PDFKnowledge transfer has been evidently witnessed for generations. Through the evolution of the human race, from learning to create fire with sticks and flint to the innovation of designing human-like robots that have emotions through technology, humans have come a long way in terms of innovation that continuously defines our future today. This paper investigates the importance of knowledge generation and its transfer to enable systemic solutions to design. It refers to the role of tacit knowledge in craft and its non-explicit form of pedagogical framework. Furthermore, it looks into the systemic design practices and their framework and aims to compare how the former knowledge transfer is also an essential influence on the latter for better design solution building.
The research draws on examples of the world of traditionally skilled craftspeople and their knowledge generation and pedagogical influence on the various design practices. This is further exemplified through case studies of certain craft practises and the importance of the same in order to form a bridge and understand the various parallels between tacit knowledge and systemic design, as well as the probable learnings they can have from each other. Methodologically, the multiple case studies investigate various skilled crafts, collect empirical data and confirm the influence of tacit knowing to be an important influence in the systems field. The research findings reveal that tacit knowledge has a nature to innate some process that we formally express to be used in design practices and pedagogy. It further looks at how systemic design practices are influenced by this form of knowledge
Designing Infrastructures of Care: An exploration of listening and slowness for socio-ecological wellbeing
Get PDFThe pace of existing Western systems continues to contribute to underlying socioecological crises, the ramifications of which are felt globally. Whilst there is arguably a need to reduce this pace and consider multigenerational implications, there is tension in how the notion of slowness is balanced with the urgency of planetary crises. Therefore, this presentation asks: How might sustainable design practice a slow ontology that seeks to balance calls for both slowness and urgency within socioecological crises? What might this approach reveal about the in-betweens and the unheard? How might listening facilitate this? In this presentation, I reflect on the value of listening and slowness in designing infrastructures of care. Primarily drawing on Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening, Ranulph Glanville’s cybernetic rumination on listening and Jasmine B. Ulmer’s notion of slow ontology, I present a case for how these might be collectively integrated into methodological approaches when designing for socio-ecological care. I also present reflections on how this thinking has influenced an evolving methodology underpinning my own work. Considering listening and the notion of slowness, I argue, makes space for design beyond solutionism and for designers to remain open to more diverse modes of enquiry when dealing with wicked problems. Through listening, I pose an invitation for designers and researchers to question what lies between, to whom, and what remains unheard, thus remaining open to the limitations of chosen methodologies. Through provocations offered in this presentation, I hope to contribute to a discussion on methods and the worlds they make by exploring the value of listening and slowness in the context of design for socioecological care. Exploring methodological engagement with listening and slowness in sustainable design, an invitation for more reflexive, transdisciplinary and radical methodologies is proposed
Insights from the Design for Planet Fellowship
Get PDFIn December 2021, the Design Council launched the Design for Planet Fellowship: a proto-type programme that convened eight designers working across disciplines to develop new practices around regenerative design. The programme began as an opportunity to explore the important role designers can play as knowledge-weavers within systemic change: identifying opportunities for cross-sector collaboration, knowledge transfer and facilitating those relationships (Drew and Hunter, 2021). It also sought to investigate a series of key issues within regenerative design, from design’s entanglement with language to mapping the power relations that shape practice. This presentation shares key insights from the fellowship and reflections on how to create spaces for collective enquiry into design systems
Exodus and the Anthropocene: Tracing climate-change-induced migration in India
Get PDFFor thousands of years humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterised by mean annual temperatures of around ∼13 °C. Depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 years, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity in the past. Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today. (Xu et al., 2020)
Internal climate migrants are rapidly becoming the human face of climate change. By 2050—in just three regions—climate change could force more than 143 million people to move within their countries. (Kanta Kumari Rigaud et al., 2018). Our studies indicate that a substantial number of instances of climate change-induced migration are already happening across the Indian subcontinent. Often, these changes in the climate are the direct result of anthropogenic activities.
We propose that migration is not a system but a behaviour of the system that governs how suitable a location is for long-term settlement. We also propose a set of factors, called the Human Liveability Factors (HLFs for short), that influence this suitability. The impact of these factors is interpreted with a subjective lens by the inhabitants according to the means at their disposal. As the perceived “liveability” of a place falls, the inhabitants tend towards migration.
From a systems perspective, we observed that HLFs influence each other and are externally influenced by factors such as changes in population, particularly in the case of climate migrants’ natural environment stressors. We also draw correlations between NDVI data of the past decade to current climate migration hotspots in the Indian subcontinent, confirming that most of these hotspots lie in regions with a significant loss in vegetation.
We use the HLF framework to demonstrate the case for the Beed district in Maharashtra, India, in the present day and the case of Mumbai, India, against the projected rise in sea level for the year 2040.
We also present three conceptual solutions that cater to the needs of adaptability and resilience to tackle climate migration in India within the context of livelihoods, urban planning, and CSR Initiative
System-Shifting Design: An emerging practice explored
Get PDFReport summary and reflections on turning into practice
System Shifting Design was published by the Design Council and The Point People in 2021 as an emerging practice observed by designers across the world who are working to deliberately and generatively create new systems of regenerative planetary health. The report starts with a critique of the existing system of design before setting out some characteristics of both ‘system conscious design’ (designing with an awareness of the wider system in which you are part) and ‘system shifting design’ (designing to deliberate transition to a new system), and some provocations for how the design system itself needs to change to support this more radical and necessary way of designing. A way of designing that works at the level of deep structures and narrative as well as physical things or spaces, that makes to reveal and invites further possibility rather than purely solving discrete problems, and assembles and provisions collectives of organizations who can shape the transition.
In this paper, the authors reflect on the nine months since publication, how the wider context of design and funding practice has changed, how the report’s ideas are being translated into practice, and some of the significant challenges with doing so. They observe that while ‘system conscious’ design is becoming increasingly mainstream, ‘system-shifting’ design is still emergent, with some important new voices and writing, but significant effort is needed to explain and invest in the deep work needed to change the heart of our current systems
To Witness, To Practise, To Recognise: We see water system
Get PDFThe goal of this concept research is to enhance works of art made by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Piazza Navona, Piazza di Spagna and Piazza Barberini in the city of Rome (Italy) with a vision of care and knowledge for the water entity.
This design proposal hopes to create a link and a dialogue between two dimensions: the artistic works, represented by Bernini’s fountains inside the architectonic spaces of these plazas on one side, and the dimension of common good environmental heritage of the element water that lives inside the shapes and art of the Bernini’s fountains.
This design scenario is a macro design system that has been developed with first-year Master’s students in Systemic Design
Women and Money: An investigation into gender disparity in financial literacy
No full textFinancial literacy refers to the necessary knowledge of various aspects of finance to empower an individual’s decision-making skills related to personal financial goals and objectives. And this knowledge is missing in the large group of young demographic in India. Financial Literacy is already low, and if we look into it from a gender point of view, the percentage bar goes further down for women.
Financial behaviour is the management of personal finances, including savings and investments, expenditures, budget, etc., that requires informed decision-making skills. UNICEF outlines the 16 basic life skills for youth, and decision-making is one of them. With time, there has been a paradigm shift in gender roles concerning different professions and sectors, with women taking the lead in various professional fields. However, money management and financial independence are not vested in women’s hands in many cases. There is a need to identify financial behaviour as one of the essential basic life skills.
Financial literacy is impacted deeply by the significant gender-based disparities in Indian society. The findings highlight a considerable scope of intervention toward improving Financial literacy that has a great potential to shape financial behaviour and make a significant move toward diluting the difference between finance and gender.
This project aims to instigate a conversation about this form of gender disparity by studying, understanding, and analyzing the plausible factors, existing or upcoming, at a system level. Adopting a reflective-gamified design to develop a tool for self-reflection that can impact the financial behavior of young urban women is one of the propositions of this project that has been detailed for testing among a focus group through a participatory approach
A Future-Forward Examination of the Viability of Worker Cooperatives Within the Digital Games Industry
Get PDFIn this thesis I explore the subject of cooperative labour and its potential broad adoption within the digital games industry in light of recent unionization efforts. I begin with historical and environmental scans to examine the trends surrounding the practices of digital game development and publishing, followed by a review of the literature on worker cooperatives as an alternative to the traditional hierarchical organization prevalent within the digital games industry, and finally apply the Three Horizons model as a foresight method to ascertain what impact the broader adoption of this model might have upon the digital games industry. Through this study, I present the indie games movement as a site of industry disruption, and its recent experiments with worker cooperatives as an indicator towards emerging future game development practices, highlighting points of synergy between indie game development and worker cooperative principles. I conclude with the suggestion that this structure affords the opportunity to develop games collaboratively between independent studios towards their own ends beyond profit and shift towards a more equitable, creative and collaborative game development ecosystem