Beyond Design and Play: Gaging a Responsible path for Designing the Future

Designers draw inspiration from the societal needs around them. In Design Education, efforts have been made to assess the potential personal, social, health and environmental impact of a design in its early stages. To add to this body of knowledge we updated the Future Scenario Development, Play and Design methodology. This scenario development approach aims at exploring futures that are more than just a few years ahead of us. In the master course Create the Future, the students follow this approach to develop a future context for their own conceptual design phase. When they subsequently design “their own future” we want to make them aware of the multifaceted effects of their designs. We therefore expanded the method to include responsibility and societal influence assessment tools such as the Product Impact Tool (PIT), and Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA). With a case study, based on the results of an Industrial Design Engineering Master course concerning the design of the “Future of Healthcare”, we will show how this Design of the Future methodology is able to explain the present and future interplay between society, culture and technology. We will especially dive deeper into the experiences with the assessment tools and how they influenced the design phase and eventually the design concepts presented by the students. From the results of the case study we can conclude that our proposed method provides the students with an effective arsenal of tools through which to envision, reflect and design for the future.