Future tense: exploring dissonance in young people’s images of the future through design futures methods

Abstract

The lack of progress in the face of complex sustainability challenges has in part been attributed to a lack of imagination, rather than awareness. Nurturing and surfacing pluralistic alternative futures, as well imagining the pathways that might get us there, are key processes in bridging this imagination gap. The emerging field of design futures provides methods and tools to develop narratives as well as tangible artefacts depicting products, services and experiences set within alternative futures. These methods build on long-established interdisciplinary inquiries into how and why people develop images of the futures. The present research aims to explore young people’s images of the future (set in 2068 and 2038) through design futures methods. This paper presents the outcomes of a series of workshops in which over 70 young people (aged 16–17) imagined a series of alternative futures and developed artefacts that support the pathways towards these futures. The results reveal that while design futures methods are effective in developing and interrogating collective future imaginaries, deeper challenges rooted in the homogeneity of dominant Western imaginaries and the hyper–individualistic turn of late–modernity remain.