Design Futures

Tutors: Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa & Charlotte Jarvis

Design Futures is a new pathway launched from within the design products MA programme. We know more about the future than any other generation of humans, yet this comes at a price of increasing complexity and a far more urgent call for action to move away from undesirable futures towards preferred futures. Design is founded on knowledge for future transformation and design futures uses strategic, systemic and highly applied design to question and improve our futures.

In Design Futures we imagine, build and critique possible futures. Students deconstruct the past and break down the present to build worlds, objects and creatures waiting to come into existence. Design Futures encourages wild speculation alongside rigorous research. We embrace wonder and terror; we draw from science fiction as well as science fact; we seek ritual alongside experiment and we seek both plausibility and magic.

Work from this year’s students includes: Post carbon futures to the unsettling future of smells, Imagining future sports equipment for the first Martian Olympics, how IQ tests exclude neurodiversity and aiming to understand intelligence from a new perspective, the future of sharing, the future of food systems, the future of body modification and copyright legislation and inside the future of criminal justice.