Building Better Futuring Into Our Workshops

Unless we up our futuring game, we risk giving our clients the tools to recreate the present. 

HOSTS: TVW Learning Community member Dee Brooks and Kathryn Cramer

Background

In futures and foresight practice, the future is explored through scenarios. This is also true in co-design, but the approaches vary in important ways. 

Scenarios written by futures professionals are based on detailed research and are used to challenge and present alternatives to business-as-usual assumptions. 

In co-design practice, scenarios are mostly used to stretch client thinking and may be the product of more loosely-informed interpretations of evidence about the future. This approach has helped countless clients, but it risks leaving assumptions and biases about the future unchallenged. In our era of climate crisis, this could be dangerous. 

What steps might we take to help our sponsors and participants craft future-ready strategic visions and models? How might we support our sponsors on a journey toward future-informed leadership? 

Contemporary approaches to futuring can offer new models, tools, and language to co-design practitioners. Join us for an introduction to emerging innovation at the intersection of futuring and co-design. 

Our Workshop

In this workshop, we’ll… 

• Explore selected models, language, and techniques used by contemporary futures professionals
• Compare and contrast futuring in co-design with professional futures practice
• Play with and generate feedback on prototypes of one or more futuring modules currently under development:

• Horizon Scan
• Futures Scenarios

Participants will come away with deeper understandings of the origin and use of familiar terms of art such as “weak signal” and “scenario.” They’ll also gain new language and perspectives on the future and the variety of ways in which we can explore it and co-create it. 

Our Hosts

Dee Brooks is Venture Lead at Accelerated By Design. In 2019, building on nearly 20 years in co-design practice, she published a major research paper exploring the intersection of the MG Taylor DesignShop® Process and Strategic Foresight. She is now focused on applying that research to support the growth of future-informed leadership, decision making, and strategy. 

Kathryn Cramer is Futures Lead at Accelerated By Design. Her perspective on the future runs the gamut from computational forecasting to science fiction. She has edited numerous science fiction anthologies including Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future. In 2020, while studying at OCAD University, she published A Thousand Futures: A Search for Scenario Space.