What challenges will the next decade bring?
How are we going to overcome them?
So asked the The Institute for the Future of thousands of participants via its progressive Superstruct online interface to co-create its Ten Year Forecast. Density Design was asked by Italy’s Wired magazine to devise a visual synthesis of the forecast which could be used to stimulate onwards discussion by a wider audience.
Density Design is a research lab at the Politecnico di Miano which explores the emergent relationships between communication design, information visualisation and complex systems. It supports the use of communication design to facilitate dialogue within participatory decision making.
Creatively combined with an exquisite concoction of allegorical illustrations, the resulting Map of the Future provides a common visualisation on which to base discussions and analysis of what may lie ahead. The map has already been put to use at the Capitale Digitale collaborative sessions held by Wired & Telecom Italia. Hard to imagine going back to a paltry powerpoint pie-chart after being served up this flavorsome infographic feast.
See stunningly detailed sections of the map on Behance.
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“Attack complacency. Lay siege to boundaries. Load your catapult with options”
– fundamental Moxism
Recently I participated in a NextPlays lab by Moxie Design Group along with ten others from diverse involvements spanning government, non-profit and corporate realms. NextPlays is a transformative platform encompassing a culture of participation to explore sustainable future scenarios – then to imagine, plan and build strategies around them.
The session was exceptionally well devised as a fast-paced yet flexible programme which harnessed group energy and maintained momentum throughout the day. Activities alternated between presentations and discussion on context and challenges, exposure to inspiring case studies, rigorous team brainstorming around specific scenarios – and the personas that would be interacting with them. The seamless framework focused participants’ energy on a wide range of variables toward cultivating sustainable and transformative solutions.
NextPlays Labs have been conducted by Moxie with a wide range of organisations both global and local – from Air New Zealand to the World Bank and upcoming sessions with big boys Procter & Gamble. Each lab is specifically tailored to relevant issues facing the organisations, with the Moxie team skillfully migrating approaches on the fly to accommodate the unique needs of participating enterprises. Strategist Bert Aldridge notes “NextPlays is not about delivering answers but rather it’s an engagement tool to enable and build capacity around the seeking of solutions” while director Peter Salmon succinctly refers to its power to “catalyse conversations towards sustainable outcomes.”
The labs have been used in both Bangkok and Hanoi to explore urban development in conjunction with the World Bank Institute. Participants in these workshops have included community educators, climatologists, architects, environmental youth groups, waste management specialists and urban planners. In such company NextPlays has played a role in the aligning of agendas towards future-focused outcomes on a civic scale. Through encouraging an appreciation of inter-connectedness, divergent players discover potential efficiencies and opportunities.
And back here on home turf I found the expert guidance from scenarios to solutions, context to collaboration, macro to micro – all made for a highly rewarding and productive experience of the Moxie mix.
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My week has been peppered with conversations on the use of scenario building as a
method of design thinking. This took me back to fond memories of working alongside my inspirational colleague MP Ranjan at the National Institute of Design (NID) in India who has been pushing the barrow of design thinking and its extensive applications from way before it became a hot topic.
Energetic in mind and manner, Ranjan has been evolving his invigorating, provocative and immensely popular Design Concepts & Concerns course for close to two decades now. A cornerstone of the programme is his learning from the field model which is kicked off by investigating local micro-enterprises.
By closely examining sidewalk entrepreneurs, students are encouraged to engage in a rich exploration of current scenarios to spark dimensional discussion towards enhanced scenarios. This process lays the foundation for future envisioning that can be scaled to embrace complex challenges to which design thinking can be applied: from systems to services and beyond.
Ranjan elaborates on the course blog:
… it is far easier to start with small and micro enterprises such as street food vendors who are easily accessible and can therefore be a very useful source of business learning and about a number of finer aspects of entrepreneurial behavior. Each of these micro businesses is indeed homologous to a huge multi-national business conglomerate in a similar line of business such as the ones involved in the preparation and delivery of food to their customers across several continents.
As design extends its focus from product innovation to social innovation (including significant expansion into service design) one hopes that design schools are exposing students to relevant skills and contexts. And as Ranjan has clearly demonstrated – those contexts can be as close as the nearest street corner.
Images from students of the DCC Foundation Class of 2006
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