Introduction to Dexign the Future

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at
changing existing situations into preferred ones.
-Herbert A. Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 1969

The future is already here, it just isn’t very well distributed.
– William Gibson, 1993.

As corporations, governmental organizations, and non-government organizations face rapid change and uncertain times they are looking for new ways of thinking and acting. For designers trained to shape futures defined by change and uncertainty there are unprecedented opportunities. In this course, students explore the forces that drive change in the future (i.e., social, economic, political, environmental, technological), and learn to align innovation strategically with the trajectories of those forces on long-time horizons. In this course, we focus on developing design agility with design methods for long time horizons. Traditional design methods such as Human-Centered Design and Design Thinking do not prepare designers to think systematically about long-time horizons. The goal of this course is to teach designers design methods for long time horizons. Design for long time horizons is of particular interest for challenges like transition design towards sustainable futures or more generally to design in turbulent times characterized by rapid change.

The Introduction to Dexign the Future course is taught at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University by Peter Scupelli fall semester 2014. The Dexign the Future course taught fall 2013 by Arnold Wasserman and Peter Scupelli is here http://dexignthefuture.com/

Dexign Futures was taught in 2016-2017 as a flipped-classroom pedagogy by Peter Scupelli https://dexignfutures.com/

all materials copyright © Peter Scupelli 2014 unless otherwise noted.