Connecting to the Future: Using Serious games and Scenario development for Responsible Design

Design is a medium that allows for storytelling, at the same time design can be inspired, informed, or improved by stories. In Design Education, past year’s efforts have been made to let the content speak more vividly to the students. We introduce the Future Scenario Development Play and Design methodology as a process for Research through Design. Based on the Future Scenario Development Design methodology (Eggink & Albert de la Bruheze, 2015), this scenario development approach aims at exploring futures that are more than just a few years ahead of us. We expanded the method with a serious game and a general conceptual design phase. The scenario of a plausible future, broken into three-time horizons (5, 15, and 30 years), provides the requirements, opportunities, and constraints for the design. The serious game SES (Scenario Exploration System) (Bontoux & Bengtsson, 2016) provides a safe sandbox for the students to explore two contrasting future scenarios of their own making. Through this half-day experiential exploration students empathise with relevant stakeholders by taking up their role. This approach allows the students to stumble upon the intricacies of their scenarios and set their own creative constraints for the conceptual design phase to follow.
With a case study, based on the results of an Industrial Design Engineering Master course concerning the design of the “Future of Food”, 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 dive deeper into how the experiences from the game sessions 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 to use in their design process while offering them a well-rounded experience through which to envision, empathise with, design and create for the future.