Workshops

DESIGNING FOR MORE THAN HUMAN FUTURES:

Design Research Beyond Humanity

This interactive, co-creation workshop encourages participants to critically question the prevailing design principles of human-centered design, and examine whether or not it still represents our interactions with nature and technology. Through several exercises, such as developing speculative scenarios, creating critical objects, and generating a ‘more than human’ glossary, participants are encouraged to explore the future from a multispecies perspective and contribute to positive ecological and social transformation.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

SENSEMAKING FOR THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

This workshop introduces a new tool that strikes a balance between the depth of qualitative approaches and the scalability of quantitative approaches to sense-making. By aggregating micro-narratives, this tool allows for the incorporation of a large volume of individual experiences, and the meanings people ascribe to them, allowing us to analyze and synthesize the experiences of a large number of people in order to make better use of them in the design process.

4 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

Stop Designing Artifacts. Please Build Speculative Worlds!

New approaches explore how Speculative Design & Design Fiction can be used to explicitly focus on broader social, technical & political worlds in which speculative artifacts exist. These approaches go beyond immediate moments of use & view worlds holistically, examining technological impacts & the maintenance & repair that keeps artifacts working. This workshop expands on these approaches, experimenting with techniques to envision more robust worlds.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

IMMERSIVE FUTURE CRAFTING

Virtual work has deprived us of sensual perception, the unspoken, intangible, and implicit cues of the world around us, making speculative thinking challenging in virtual environments. In this workshop, participants will bring abstract scenarios to life in a less theoretical and more physical way, engaging with meditation and physical crafting through a ‘long screen break’. The goal is to create a state where it’s possible to leave distractions behind and freely dream about futures.

6 Hour Workshop (Full day) // Presented in English

Designing from Waste

Crowdsourcing a Design Fiction Artifact

This workshop rethinks what waste means to humans and how we might translate this meaning into tangible matter through both theory and practice. First, participants will learn about the role food waste can play in complex circular economies and urban empowerment. Then, they will get their hands dirty, and learn how to get started with DIY material-making by creating natural colors from flood-leftovers via an open-source recipe.

2 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

POSTCARDS FROM THE FUTURE:

Crowdsourcing a Design Fiction Artifact

Postcards from the Future is a crowdsourced & co-created design fiction project that’s the result of more than a year of collaboration between workshop facilitators & creatives from around the world. In this workshop, participants will create the next “Postcard from the Future” by moving through speculative methods like scanning, world-building, and design fiction. The postcards will later be hosted on the project website and inform future discourse.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

PREFERABLE WORLDS:

Design Practices for Alternative Futures

Today, design is broadly understood to be an essential mode of engaging with the world by organizations and communities, therefore a major vector for change. In this workshop, participants will learn how to use James Dator’s “Four Generic Images of the Future” framework to map out current discussions in economics, political theory, and social movements about what comes next, and most importantly, what needs to be done to get there.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

Demarcation Point and Your New Normal

Today is a time of constant reflection for all of us, with the world around us opening us to infinite possibilities and new ways of being. In this workshop, participants will use speculative frameworks to analyze past, present, and future in a single frame, leveraging different prompts that will help integrate the last seven years of their lives with the next seven by finding moments, insights, and themes that connect past to future.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

Recanvassing Business Unmodels for the Post-Growth Era

Business models and plans are essentially speculative fictions designed to convince others to fund things that the writer wants to accomplish. In this workshop, participants will take these tools to the next level by perverting the tired Business Model Canvas to describe post-growth businesses and convince partners to back them. This will be an experimental workshop, but with the very serious goal of imagining what a ‘business’ might mean in very different worlds.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

CAMPAIGN FICTION:

Using Experiential Advertising to Create Desirable Futures

Advertising often has a bad reputation but often provides a valuable ethnographic tool for understanding modern societies. Ad campaigns mirror people, gender roles, social cliches, media usage, humor, values, and more. In this workshop, participants will combine ‘classic’ campaign development tools with elements from futures and foresight practice to leverage the cultural potential of ad campaigns in a systematic and speculative way, “Campaign Fiction”.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

IMAGINING PREFERABLE AI FUTURES

How do you feel when thinking about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Curiosity? Hope? Angst? This workshop leverages futures thinking methodology to imagine positive AI narratives for the days to come. Participants will embark on a healing journey across a spectrum of possible futures and zoom in on those that bring a hopeful change by using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as moral guidelines.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English

Sci-fi Narrative Workshop

The most successful organizations cultivate the ability to think long-term with clarity and confidence, but making ideas about the far-future tangible can be quite challenging. In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to bring their vision to life through science fiction narratives. Joined by leading futurists, engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs, they will work through the writing process and learn how to think big with creativity and imagination.

3 Hour Workshop // Presented in English