A Responsible Futuring Approach to Create Spaces of Transdisciplinary Co-Speculation

This essay elaborates on how design research education can play a pivotal role in fostering futures-oriented competences through the provision of transdisciplinary spaces of co-speculation in learning trajectories. These spaces bring communities together around societal challenges, encouraging active engagement in the exploration of potential futures, aware of the controversial, ambiguous and complex nature of our pasts, presents and futures. In particular, we propose ‘Responsible Futuring’ as a methodological framework for communities of learners to scaffold their own spaces for transdisciplinary co-speculation. We describe how we put Responsible Futuring into practice in the learning trajectory ‘Shaping Responsible Futures’, at the University of Twente to develop key competences such as ‘controversing’, sensemaking, collective imagination, ‘tangibilization’ and reflexivity.