Alternative futures show new possibilities

When you’re a group of people charting a journey somewhere, it’s generally a good idea to have a shared sense of where you’re going. At least you’d want a shared direction, but ideally, you aim for the same destination. It doesn’t have to be the final destination, maybe it’s just a rest stop along the way, but it is somewhere. 

For this, it is useful to work with what would often be called a preferred future, a subcategory of future scenarios that describe the future we want to see in the ever-growing field of disciplines that work with the future as a subject. The field continues to expand but includes directions such as strategic foresight or design approaches like speculative design (Speculative Everything (2013) by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby is a classic), design fiction (Julian Bleeker et al. from the Near Futures Laboratory just released the excellent Manual of Design Fiction last year), and transition design (Terry Irwin, Gideon Kossoff, and Cameron Tonkinwise are among the pioneers. The website for the Transition Design Seminar at Carnegie Mellon is a great place to start). 

The concept of the ‘preferred future’ as a guiding star for the long term is gaining ground these years. It makes sense; a good story about a possible future where systems work differently and lives within them are better can encapsulate and communicate the hope and nuance we so desperately need.

In a time when you might feel like a passenger in a train car that is steadily moving toward the abyss, such stories are in short supply. Instead of only looking for technical answers in the here and now, we should think much more long-term. That requires us to set a direction collectively, focus on creating fertile ground for systemic change, and cultivate connected ecologies of experiments that can evolve and share learnings over time. A preferred future can become that trellis upon which our interventions in the present can grow. 

The otherwise appealing concept of preferred futures is not the only, and often not even the first, type of future scenario to consider when working with long-term strategic perspectives. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in one of her Earthsea novels: 

“It’s a rare gift to know where you need to be before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.” 

The work mustn’t just be about drawing a picture of where we want to go. It must actively explore the alternatives and examine their opportunities and challenges. In other words, consciously working with more than just a single rosy utopia (that a preferred future isn’t and shouldn’t be a perfect utopia is a conversation of its own). 

There are at least three good reasons for this:

1. It helps us expand the opportunity space. When we explore multiple, diverse alternative futures, we push the boundaries of what we can imagine. This can open our eyes to entirely new possibilities and risks.
2. When we give life to alternative realities and their systems and logics, the logics of our system become more apparent. Invisible mechanisms, power relations, and relationships that we never imagined could be different suddenly become visible, and we can actively challenge them and think about them differently. Without this awareness, we risk building systems that look new on the surface but reproduce existing problems underneath.
3. It allows us to uncover blind spots. By testing our possible solutions in different hypothetical contexts, we can become aware of strengths and weaknesses that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

There are several tools and approaches for working proactively with the future. They all try to mobilize our imagination and give us images of what alternative futures might look like. 

In our exploration of alternative future perspectives on aging and care, we developed a series of very tangible ‘future fragments’. Speculative artifacts from the future with a bit of story attached. Not necessarily attractive but rather thought-provoking. The tactile and physical qualities of the fragments made it possible for people to get closer to actually experiencing an alternative future in their bodies.

One of the most powerful fragments was, in many ways, one of the simplest: The Caregel. This biomedical gel gives the patient the sensation of being physically touched by another human. Due to the lack of human care workers, a synthetic alternative has been developed. Caregel is especially prescribed for lonely people in nursing homes and retirement homes. However, the product can also be used on children as young as three in consultation with your doctor.

The potential of design

In recent years, the design field has undergone a process of self-examination. It is now widely recognized that the design discipline has been a driving, aestheticizing engine in accelerating the major problems we face — and that it, therefore, must help do something about them.

The realization has accelerated the proliferation of speculative, critical, systemic, and sustainable design perspectives. As two examples of crystallizations of all this, Danish design professor Ida Engholm published the book Design for the new world – from human design to planet design earlier this year, and DDC CEO Christian Bason, with Jens Martin Skibsted published the book Expand: Stretching the future by design last year. 

In both books, design work with the future as the subject matter is a central piece. We also see more and more design schools worldwide offering modules, courses, and entire programs with a long-term and systemic design perspective.

At DDC, we naturally see massive potential in a design-based approach to working with complex issues and wild problems. The design field works with visual, tangible, and collaborative methods that allow for joint exploration and testing of the future, as well as much broader involvement. 

Design-based approaches focus more on democratizing, distributing power, involving, and experimenting. It is central to the designer’s mindset to be in a constant flux between the exploratory and the propositional, where insights emerge through alternately exploring problems and attempting to intervene in them.

That is ideal in situations and challenges characterized by ambiguity and internal contradictions – just as the DNA of complex, systemic problems. And this is especially crucial in complex systems where many people, processes, and structures must come together.

A case: A city where young people thrive 

In March 2022, we at DDC committed to addressing our society’s complex and systemic growing problem: the increasing lack of well-being among young people. We wanted to challenge the dominant narrative and create a new unifying, visionary narrative where youth thrive. We insisted on understanding the problem in a new way, discovering the unknown possibilities a new understanding would unlock, and exploring how we could realize them with others.

We brought together a group of people with broad representation from the established ecosystem: Foundations, public organizations, NGOs, private companies, and other actors not traditionally associated with the issue. The aim was to gain radically new perspectives on challenges and opportunities and get insights that could form the basis for shaping a new direction, a shared mission to work for a society where young people thrive.

We started by exploring the past and the present. We investigated why the mental health system looks the way it does today and the discourses and logics it is built on. We explored where in the system existing structures and frameworks create a collective experience of lack of well-being among young people and how the material of the system, the purpose of the system, its power structures, resource flows, and the relationship patterns that support the undesirable situation. This work highlighted how shifts in the system’s composition could turn problems into opportunities and thus allow completely different types of solutions.

With our historical insights and an understanding of the present-day system, we moved our attention toward the far future. Among the many scenarios explored was a world where you have a legal right to thrive and can sue people for hurting your well-being. Suppose you think the local government, your teacher, your ex, your father, the supermarket, your classmate, Instagram, or your boss limit your well-being. In that case, you report them to the police and let the courts decide whether you are entitled to compensation.