Design Futures Literacies in 2 volumes
We are pleased to announce the publication of two new e-books on DESIGN FUTURES LITERACIES as final outcomes from the FUEL4DESIGN project.
The publications draw on a diversity of views, experience, practices and commitments that have led to the development of resources, experiences and reflections on placing futures perspectives and anticipatory designing and pedagogies within design education.
To download the digital books and promotional material
The two free PDF e-books are available on the Design Futures Manual page.
A flier on the books can be downloaded here.
On the books
DESIGN FUTURES LITERACIES: PRACTICES & PROSPECTS (VOL. 1) positions our funded collaborative project within discourses and practices of design education. It shifts it towards futures in design education and builds upon pedagogies and research on futures of design education. Detailed overviews are given of work carried out under five work packages mediated through the project website. Our anticipatory design pedagogies and related literacies are summarised and positioned in regard to articulating possible and illustrative transformative teaching and learning, less definitive and normative frames. Examples are provided from novel work carried out by project partners, students and participants. These are more than merely illustrative. They point to actual accessible resources that are online and suggest some of the ways design futures literacies might be approached in interplays between futures and design.
This work is placed within wider transdisciplinary relational design inquiry in the second book DESIGN FUTURES LITERACIES: ESSAYS & REFLECTIONS (VOL. 2). Here a weave of eight extended essays provides elaboration on pedagogies and practice, making, learning and reflection presented in Volume 1. Through a mix of presentational modes, the essays enact a situated, relational and collaborative design rhetoric that articulates dynamics in working with futures and design as learning and compositional materials. In so doing, futures and literacies are positioned as plural, situated and located within emergent acts and processes of becoming geared towards supporting wider creative-critical knowing connected to 21st design literacies. Such acts and processes are located within learning and teaching through anticipatory designing. They draw together creative, critical imaginaries in shaping shared futures by design in working towards alternative presents and actionable futures.
Intended audiences
Drawing together a range of innovation, experimentation and critical reflection, these publications will also be of interest to graduate students Design and related educators and researchers. They offer frank and contextualised material on working to make pragmatic yet critical sense of the complex challenges of developing preparatory curricula and situated content for building 21st century competencies and fluencies within and beyond Design. These books will be of interest to design students, educators and researchers together with those working in related practice and with policy. The publications also cover matters of wider communication of design’s roles in shaping shared sustainable futures and thereby offer pragmatic and analytical resources for educators, researchers, administrators and strategists beyond Design.
Contributions to design, learning and futures
Our work in Design Futures Literacies points to difficult, complex and entangled engagement with learning and teaching to take care ahead of time. It encompasses creative, ethical articulations of working with challenges of uncertainty and change. Systemically, these are matters that matter immensely for higher education and how Design universities may contribute influence and impact for wider societal transformation in which ecology and businesses, making and consumption, resource uses and the pursuit of wider global equity may be realised. We hope that the publications bring novel connections between Futures Studies and Design pedagogies and research and indicate some of the ways in which design may engage productively and critically with shaping shared futures.