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Journal of Futures Studies, June 2019, 23(4): 37–50
Are We (Really) Designing Futures? The Design of Tomorrow Program at CENTRO
Karla Paniagua, CENTRO Advanced Design Institute, Mexico
Abstract
This paper presents the preliminary results of a review of the first four years of the postgraduate course in Design of Tomorrow, which CENTRO Advanced Design Institute in Mexico City has offered since 2014. It assesses whether the program is achieving the aim of having students “design futures,” and to what extent the program conforms to the principles of foresight according to Wendell Bell. The question in the title is answered affirmatively, but with some important caveats, and areas of opportunity for improving the design of the program are identified.
Keywords: Creative Economy, Design Education, Design Fiction, Foresight Programs.
Introduction
In this paper we describe the process of creating and developing “Design of Tomorrow,” a one-year graduate program offered by CENTRO Advanced Design Institute since 2016, to train all kinds of professionals interested in designing and implementing possible, probable or preferable futures.
The focus here is evaluative, reflecting on a process that began as part of a renewal of curriculum that the institution considers as part of its best practices, and which also responds to the guidelines of the Ministry of Public Education of Mexico. CENTRO is currently preparing to become certified as part of the Federation of Mexican Institutions of Higher Education, so all curricula are in the process of improvement.
This article includes a description of the research process and the structure of the program, as well as a review of its preliminary results based on the evidence collected so far. Are our graduates designing futures? Are they capable of performing the crucial tasks of Futures Studies in the terms established by Wendell Bell? If not, what is needed to achieve this? These are the questions that will be answered in this paper.
For our purposes, the following definition from the Design Council (Mathers, n.d.) will be taken as a reference: “Design is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end”, considering as its primary tasks framing, problem-solving, form, function, and style.
Next, the crucial tasks that for Wendell Bell (1997, p. 111) represent the main purposes of Futures Studies are framed as questions here to make evaluation easier:1
- Do graduates have the skills to study possible futures?
- Do graduates have the skills to study probable futures?
- Do graduates have the skills to study images of the future?
- Do graduates know the foundations of Futures Studies?
- Do graduates have the skills to study the ethical foundations of Futures Studies?
- Can graduates interpret the past and orient the present?
- Do graduates integrate knowledge and values for designing social action?
- Do graduates have the skills to increase democratic participation in imaging and designing the future?
- Do graduates have the skills to communicate and advocate a specific image of the future?
Bell’s approach to Futures Studies was chosen to give intelligibility and inspiration to participants in the process: its broad trajectory is indisputable, so we can consider these principles to be representative (although without excluding other possible formulations) of the whole professional field.
CENTRO is an educational institution located in Mexico City, specialized in the training of professionals in the Creative Economy, a vibrant sector defined by inventiveness; for example in activities such as design, publishing, and digital media, among other activities that imply industrial or intellectual property.
For John Howkins, “a creative economy is a system for the production, exchange, and use of creative products. Economics deals with the problem of how individuals and societies manage to satisfy their wants, which are infinite and is primarily about the allocation of scarce resources” (2001, pp. 5-6). In this regard, CENTRO aligns all its study plans around their potential to contribute to a creative economy.
In 2014, the Research Coordination team of CENTRO was given the task of designing a new postgraduate course to bring the knowledge and skills of professionals from the creative industries to a new level. The Coordination team wanted the new experience to radically transform the way students would view reality, promote curiosity and imagination, involve research activities, and overall prepare graduates to face a changing world including an ability to address wicked problems:
[S]ocial system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information
is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with
conflicting values, and where the ramification in the whole system are thoroughly
confusing. The adjective” wicked” is supposed to describe the mischievous and
even evil quality of these problems, where proposed “solutions” often turn out
to be worse than the symptoms” (Churchman, 1967, p. B141).
The Design Process
CENTRO’s research team conducted an extensive study to identify possible graduate courses that could take design to a new level of complexity. During this phase, the team identified and analyzed 46 national and international study programs, variously focused on developing creative skills to apply to business, public policy, and solving social problems.
This mapping exercise allowed the team to visualize the possible identity of the program for CENTRO, which would have solid methodological foundations in Futures Studies and Strategic Foresight, combined with creative tools that would allow effective communication of the outputs of the foresight process; both scenarios and the strategies to achieve them.
After selecting the most inspiring programs in this area, based on their practical aspects as well as their ability to create an intuitive spark, we performed a more detailed analysis of the following programs, mostly in developed countries (Table 1).
Table 1. Programs included in the mapping phase
| Program | University | Country |
| Graduate Certificate in Future Studies | University of the Sunshine Coast | Australia |
| MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation
MA, MDes, MFA in Digital Futures |
OCAD University | Canada |
| MA in Future Studies | Freie Universität Berlin | Germany |
| Master in Futures Studies | University of Turku | Finland |
| MSc in Foresight and Innovation | University of Angers | France |
| MPhil Program in Future Studies | University of Kerala | India |
| Master in Strategic Foresight | Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education | Mexico |
| MPhil in Future Studies | Stellenbosch University | South Africa |
| MSc in Foresight | University of Houston | United States |
| MA/Ph.D. in Alternative Futures | University of Hawaii | United States |
| MBA in Strategic Foresight | California College of the Arts | United States |
Thanks to the Angers, Berlin, and Turku programs, we learned the importance of maintaining an ongoing dialogue with think tanks that gather experts around the world, both in order to receive specific feedback, as well as to maintain a network of professionals, mentors, lecturers and invited professors.
As a result of this understanding and with the purpose of studying their life trajectories, the team made contact with prominent Mexican futurists, some of whom also belong to national or international Futures Studies organizations: Margarita Arroyo (National Institute of Specialized Consulting); Guillermina Baena (World Future Studies Federation, Mexican Chapter); Antonio Alonso Concheiro (Analitica Consulting); Roger Aleph Mendez (Javier Barrios Sierra Foundation); Tomas Miklos (National Institute of Specialized Consulting); Alethia Montero; Concepcion Olavarrieta (Millennium Project, Mexican Chapter), and others, who later formed the Board of Advisors.
The history of Futures Studies in Mexico is closely related to these names. According to a history elaborated by Antonio Alonso Concheiro and quoted by Guillermina Baena (2009), the first specialized publications in the field date from 1948, although the boom started in the 1970s, with the creation of the Javier Barros Sierra Foundation (1975), the first center of Futures Studies in Mexico, led for many years by Miklos and Concheiro.
In 1994, the first foresight (prospective) Congress was held in the country, and later the production of specific content decreased, regaining momentum around the beginning of the millennium. The presence at a national level of organizations like the Club of Rome, The Millennium Project, and the World Future Society, as well as the fact that in 2019 the International Conference of the World Futures Studies Federation will take place in Mexico City, are signals of the current boom in the field.
The preceding allows us to contextualize CENTRO’s interest in carrying forward the lessons of the foresight tradition in Mexico, as well as expanding the scope of the program through international connections with institutions such as Institute for the Future (California), from which we also receive advice.
During this stage, we realized that the concept of “Design Futures” was flourishing between multiple intersections –– creativity and technology; science fact, design, and science fiction –– and becoming a resonant buzzword in various Mexican cities, although in many instances the services offered under this denomination turned out to be superficial workshops referring to utopian or dystopian futures, without any strategic vision. This situation provided clear parameters around what we did not want to be.
At the same time, we asked ourselves: if those examples are not the Design Futures we wanted to teach, how should the course be formulated? Where and how should the intersections between Futures Studies and Design occur? We started the first edition of the program with a particular combination in mind, but for the second edition made adjustments, as will be seen later.
We also identified different continuing education efforts that offered the possibility of training individuals and organizations with interest in the skills and ‘languages’ of the future. These helped us understand the importance of accompanying the graduate program with short courses; for example, the Master Class in Design Futures of the Center for Advanced Design Studies of Monterrey (CEDIM) created by Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan; the Strategic Planning: Foresight-Insight-Action workshop of the Institute for the Future; and the Futures Lab of the Extrapolation Factory.
This research process offered the team an opportunity to understand the vast and varied universe that constitutes Futures Studies, so we considered it fundamental that both the content of the classes and the profile of the team express this diversity.
The team defined as its deliverable a one-year postgraduate course (which in Mexico corresponds to the Specialty level, a degree prior to the Master’s degree), in modules between four and eight weeks long, with both convergent subjects (methodology, trends, geopolitics, strategy), and divergent ones (e.g. narrative, laboratories of theater and sound experimentation, prototyping souvenirs from the future).
The first version proposed was rejected outright by the school authorities. Our advisors encouraged us to improve each specialty, making them different and unique, according to our students’ needs.
Table 2 shows the original structure and revised (current) version of the study program.
Table 2. Program structure
| Initial Structure (2015) | First Iteration (2016) | Second Iteration (2017-2018) |
| History of Futures Studies | History of Futures Studies | History of Futures Studies |
| Foresight methodology | Foresight methods and techniques, with an emphasis on DELPHI | Foresight methods and techniques, with an emphasis on Micmac and CLA analysis |
| Systems thinking | Systems thinking and change theories | Systems thinking and change theories, including analytical tools |
| Complexity theory | Foresight intelligence | Foresight intelligence and trend analysis |
| Big data and data mining | Disruptive innovation scenarios | Speculative design |
| Economics and geopolitics | Geopolitical Context | Geopolitical context and world order |
| Symbolic anthropology | Symbolic anthropology | Anticipatory anthropology |
| Narratives | Narratives for introducing scenarios | Multimedia narratives for introducing scenarios |
| End-of-course project | Constructing scenarios | Future sounds workshop |
| Innovative strategic foresight planning processes | Strategic foresight planning processes | |
| Social innovation laboratory | Social innovation laboratory |
It is worth mentioning that one relevant finding was the importance of accompanying postgraduate content with continuing education experiences, so simultaneously a futures study boot camp and a personal futures course were designed as immersive experiences for people interested in becoming familiar with the foresight language. These programs are still going on and have gained some independence from the graduate program.
The course curriculum was built around a core of three themes: Foresight methods and techniques; Design fiction, and a Social Innovation Lab.
Foresight methods and techniques
The field includes a distinctive array of tools, instruments, and procedures, described for example in the manual of the Millennium Project (Glenn, 2009) and the Caja de herramientas de la prospectiva estrategica (Godet, 2000). On this basis, we selected vital resources taught and practiced throughout the program.
Design fiction
For Bruce Sterling, science fiction and design constitute contemporary and parallel spheres which can enrich each other (2009, 21):
We have entered an unimagined culture. In this world of search engines and cross-links, of keywords and networks, the solid smokestacks of yesterday’s disciplines have blown out. Instead of being armored in technique, or sheltered within subculture, design and science fiction have become like two silk balloons, two frail, polymorphic pockets of hot air, floating in a generally tainted cultural atmosphere.
In Sterling’s view, literature is a method of meaning and feeling, while design is a method of action: when combined, they give rise to creative responses, souvenirs from the futures that suspend disbelief (Bosch, 2012) and can facilitate a deep understanding of future scenarios, among other things.
According to Julian Bleecker (2009, p. 7):
Design fiction is a mix of science fact, design and science fiction. It is a kind of authoring practice that recombines the traditions of writing and storytelling with the material crafting of objects. Through this combination, design fiction creates socialized objects that tell stories —things that participate in the creative process by encouraging the human imagination.
The conclusion to the designed fiction are objects with stories. These are stories that speculate about new, different, distinctive social practices that assemble around and through these objects. Design fictions help tell stories that provoke and raise questions. Like props that help focus the imagination and speculate about possible near future worlds — whether profound change or simple, even mundane social practices.
Why does design fiction play such an essential role in the program? Because it is here that future studies connect with the creative industries. In workshops to produce future objects at a one-to-one scale (Figures 1, 2), stories about future scenarios, or visualizations of critical data, students link their creative explorations with formal analysis. As such, the program offers students the methodological resources (storytelling, future theater, creative writing, modeling, data visualization) so that design fiction can lead to prototypes capable of “make-believe” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 90). To inspire interest among participants to head in a specific direction, either to bring about or to avoid a specific scenario.
Figure 1. Matilde Breña, The Box of Life (2018). This box is given by parents to their children in the Mexico of the future, when they turn 20 years old, so they can legally commit suicide. From Paolo Cardini’s workshop, Souvenirs from the Future.
Figure 2. Alan Saenz, Ovotril (2018). In the Mexico of the future, the big pharmaceutical companies monopolize traditional medicine. Ovotril is a chicken egg to detect and heal the evil eye. From Paolo Cardini’s workshop, Souvenirs from the Future.
Social Innovation Lab
The application of foresight methods and techniques must focus on solving social problems, and the beneficiaries must be involved in devising solutions because they will play an essential role in their implementation. Therefore, throughout the program, students are encouraged to carry out fieldwork as participant-observers and conduct personal and group interviews, as well as workshops in which they apply their knowledge to release and direct collective intelligence.
As a complement to the fixed program, students attend international conferences with speakers who have shared with them their vision and experience, such as
Paolo Cardini (Rhode Island Institute of Design), Jim Dator (University of Hawaii at Manoa), Natalie Nixon (Figure 8 Thinking), Monika Bielskyte (All Future Everything), Gabriella Gómez-Mont (Laboratorio para la Ciudad), and José Ramos (Action Foresight).
We also have the collaboration of Jake Dunagan (Institute for the Future) as an international mentor, who visits each year to run an intensive experiential futures workshop to provide students with new tools and inspiration.
Results
As of June 2019, the fourth generation of students in the graduate specialization completes their second semester of the program, while the fifth generation is preparing to begin.
So far, 39 students from various professions, 75% from the creative industries, have been enrolled; 82% of these have completed the total credits of the program, and 7% have completed the whole process to obtain the degree of Design of Tomorrow Specialist. In order to obtain a degree, students must select a topic, generate an analysis of signals and trends, apply one or several foresight methods, design multiple future scenarios, and draw up a strategy for implementation to achieve the desired future.
To answer the question, “Are our students really designing futures?”, We examined a sample of term projects from the three first generations of the program. The selected projects meet the requirements, including analysis of context; detection of signals; study of trends; deployment of one or more foresight methods; several scenarios (in these first three years, focusing respectively on learning centers, distribution of wealth and social inequality); and a strategic proposal. One of these culminating projects has begun to be implemented, while the other two remain prototypes (Figures 3, 4).
Figure 3. Sandra Vargas’ final project workshop
Figure 4. Luis Daniel Mateos’ Term Project. Barter App Mockup
When we examine this portfolio of cases we observe in each one, in addition to fulfillment of all of Bell’s guidelines for a Futures Studies exercise, a creative quest to solve a problem or problem set; that is, an organized and systematic collection of design decisions.
In the intersection between science fact, design and science fiction, the students developed skills to design not the futures themselves (impossible in any case, according to Dator’s first law of the future2), but a series of futures narratives, visions, and souvenirs brought to the present, as well as systematic pathways to help build desirable scenarios. We do not have the certainty that our way of doing this exercise is the best, and of course it is not the only one, but it is undoubtedly a way of designing futures scenarios.
Considering this work in light of Bell’s principles, we see the following (Table 3):
Table 3. Bell’s skills accomplishment for each term project
In February 2019, a survey was administered to 26 graduates of the specialty, to gather their perceptions of their learning experiences, including knowledge and skills acquired.
From the total survey responses, 40% strongly agreed that they had learned a Futures Studies methodology, 30% agreed, and the remaining 30% was distributed equally among ‘neither agree nor disagree,’ ‘disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree’ (Graduate Students DTP, 2019).
Twenty per cent of the survey respondents strongly agreed that they had learned how to design futures, 50% agreed, 10% neither agreed nor disagreed, and 20% disagreed. Survey respondents strongly agreed that they applied the knowledge received in the specialty, 50% agreed, and the remaining 30% neither agreed nor disagreed.
Considering Bell’s principles, the complete survey provides the following overview (Table 4):
Table 4. The accomplishment of Bell’s Foresight Skills according to the graduates
Discussion
The review of projects yielded clear evidence that the program does provide the necessary elements for students to be able to design future scenarios in different formats, including the strategies to achieve them. In contrast, the survey revealed that not all graduates recognize this skill in themselves: only 20% responded with strong agreement that they have this skill. A key opportunity for improvement appears to lie in metacognition, in a more conscious exercise of our graduates as real designers of future scenarios.
Does the program enable students to practice the principles of foresight enunciated by Wendell Bell? The project assessment showed that the program did indeed appear to train graduates capable of studying possible and probable futures, as well as future visions, but as the complexity of Bell’s principles grows, the evidence of the principles’ deployment decreases: such is the case for principles 5, 8 and 9. Our students need to work more systematically and deeply about ethical reflection, the democratic exercise of imaging and designing futures, and the defense of specific visions of futures; relatively complex tasks that demand more energy and time than others. To achieve this, we intend to update the curriculum, propose an association of program graduates, and have the fourth generation of students create a manifesto to represent the spirit of the Specialty, as a start.
In this regard the survey also revealed a gap between the institution’s and the graduates’ perceptions, the latter being more optimistic: For example, unlike the institution, 66% of graduates consider having knowledge and values to design social actions (Graduate Students DTP, 2019). This points to a potential need to involve students, graduates and teachers in the redesign of curriculum, in order to minimize biases and take advantage of different visions.
The results also suggest that the institution could benefit from closer contact with other national and international institutions that offer postgraduate Futures Studies. In the first years of the program to date, our focus regarding other institutions has been on learning from (identifying and analyzing the structure of) their curricula. However, now that the program has accumulated its own experience and we have something more to offer, we are perhaps better able to take part in an open dialogue to seek exchange, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
With each iteration, the program has changed (to improve meaningfully, we hope) the teaching and learning experience, technical content, overall vision, traction with potential stakeholders, teaching quality, and applicant selection methods. These improvements have brought new results including increasingly demanding students, and higher expectations of term projects. The term project and its implementation is always the critical point, devising a strategy geared towards the achievement of desired futures is the most complex task in the professional field.
We do not want our students to become experts in designing scenarios while neglecting implementation, because the exercise is not complete without a strategy, and the strategy dies without deployment. This is where we face the most significant area of opportunity: cases of implementation remain sparse at this stage.
Another critical subject is the possibility of expanding the program to a two-year Master’s degree, since in the opinion of professors, our advisors, and graduates alike; the content is too substantial to be adequately studied and practiced in a single year. At the time of writing, we are analyzing this possibility and will make decisions shortly. In the immediate term, the curriculum is being updated completely, to incorporate the many lessons learned throughout the years to date.
Conclusion
Following Dator’s logic, just as the future can not be predicted because it does not exist, neither can it be designed instrumentally. That is, scenarios are a way to shape visions of the desirable future, without a doubt, but it will not be until the events occur (or not) that we can verify whether we “designed the futures,” and we will not always be there to see it. That is the greatest irony of our work! In this light, the question “Are we really designing futures?” does not have a final answer.
What CENTRO students are undoubtedly designing, however, are future scenarios and strategies with a solid technical basis. The next step will be to ensure that their strategies have the opportunity to be tested and realized.
Another significant finding, although it escapes the scope of the question posed, is that the Specialty in Design of Tomorrow is changing the way CENTRO itself makes decisions. This happens subtly, but we have already noticed the first signs, for example, the inclusion of small scenario design courses in the last year of all undergraduate courses as a measure to improve the long-term vision and decision-making of our graduates.
We believe that there is not merely one precise or ideal intersection (the longed-for sweet spot) between Futures Studies and Design. Indeed, good foresight always involves design decisions; choices towards preferred outcomes are supposed to be integral. In our journey to find an institutional identity, we have found in our way that the design/futures relationship is very close and that the creative industries can naturally find a source of inspiration and strength in the exercise of foresight.
Our graduates have the skills to study possible and probable futures, and images of the future, as they put into practice the methods taught in the specialty, such as Micmac (Godet, n.d.), the Anticipatory Experimentation / Bridge Method (Ramos, 2017), and Ethnographic Futures Research (Textor, 1995). They know the basics of Futures Studies because they have a history class that specifically addresses that topic. They reflect deeply on the ethical implications of future design; as an illustration, the fourth generation held a workshop on the future of economic, digital and magical revenge using the Aspirational Futures model (Bezold, 2009). They confront the difficult task of interpreting the past and orienting the present and work hard to integrate the knowledge and values of the futures discipline into the design of social actions. They also face challenges in finding ways to increase democratic participation in imaging and designing futures, as well as communicating and defending a specific image of the future.
The problems that graduates meet in learning these principles are attributable in part to the structure of the program, which emphasizes the design of futures more than strategy and implementation, but also in part perhaps to the configuration of the field itself; a hypothesis that is a subject for more in-depth research.
After all, the most significant learning from this exploration is that both design and futures studies, although they evolved as autonomous fields, are crossed by multiple intersections, so perhaps it is precisely this shared condition of being intersecting, open fields, always unfinished, that allows them to flourish and complement each other naturally.
Correspondence
Karla Paniagua
CENTRO Advanced Design Institute
Mexico
E-mail: kpaniagua@centro.edu.mx
Notes
1. These principles and questions were incorporated into the framework for improvement of the curriculum, and not in the original program design. Although included at a later stage, they proved very useful for giving a stronger direction to the graduate program.
2. “The future” cannot be “predicted,” but “alternative futures” can, and should be “forecast.” (Dator, 1995)
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