A screenshot of the NORDES Summer School 2020 webpage.

PhD researchers in Design often face challenges about how to select and position transdisciplinary vocabularies that are suited to their specific project as well as the changing character of their design domain areas. This is also quite a task when a practice-based doctorate needs to engage in future related inquiry and scales of the possible, probable, projected and putative. 

The FUEL4DESIGN project’s LEXICON looks specifically and design futures literacies in terms of their vocabularies, ranging from frameworks for semantic positioning of terms through to definitions of key design futures concepts and off-beat, playful and even provocative neologisms.

These were introduced to the bi-annual PhD Summer School hosted by the Nordic design research organisation called NORDES. AHO has been an active member of the organisation and its conferences and PhD Schools since its inauguration in 2005

The NORDES Summer School 2020

The NORDES Summer School 2020 was a 3-day online event held on 5-7 August 2020, hosted by AHO and OsloMet in Norway. With the focus on ‘designing beyond the individual’, the summer school explored how the theme of COLLECTIVES may “inform design inquiry in shaping futures that are shared and honed for common interests, needs and purposes, not only competitive and collaborative ones.”

The summer school was open and free for doctoral candidates with an overall aim to inform and strengthen understanding of the collective in their doctoral inquiries, with a specific emphasis on “examining and elaborating on related actions and methods, and situating the challenges and potentials for designing and researching design for shared and sustainable survival, via creativity with critique.”

During the summer school, a two hour activity called ‘Languaging collective futures’ was presented and facilitated by Andrew and Palak. As facilitators, our view on this activity was to bring forth the potentiality of words and how they open possibilities for ‘futuring’. These issues were taken up across the three day session. The overall aim of our activity within the workshop was to relate to the language of collectives based on FUEL4DESIGN Lexicon. 

During the first day of the summer school, participants discussed and identified key issues raised by readings on COLLECTIVES, the differences, similarities, and questions. They visually mapped some of the connections between identified issues in the literature, highlighted connections between key issues, philosophical positions, contexts, and actors.

Day 1. Literature mapping by group 4.

The participants worked on positioning their own projects on the second day of the summer school. They connected the dots of personal projects and focussed on how their project related to the theme of collectives with regards to research questions, theoretical frameworks, methodology, and socio-political context.

A snapshot of Day 2. Individual reflection on the theme of collectives, in relation to the research questions, theoretical frameworks, methodology, and socio-political context.

Our activity focusing on LEXICON took place on the second day. Through the group activities throughout the days, participants collected a list of terms which would be put into focus during this activity. After bringing attention to the words, the participants were given the task to play the REFLEXICON game. 

The REFLEXICON game was shared with participants. REFLEXICON is part of the DESIGN FUTURES LEXICON–

Here are a number of comments from PhD participants:

A selection of discussions and reflections by PhD  participants.

The third and last day culminated with focusing on writing and crafting contributions. Here the participants articulated and proposed paper ideas of the conference, collectively writing and producing a summary as an encouragement to continue developing the paper for conference submission. 

Day 3. Participants brainstorm ideas for a NORDES Conference 2021 paper.

All in all, this summer school was a very lively event, collective and individually, covering a range of modes of communication and engagement. We hope the material shared here might inspire others to take up some of the resources in the LEXICON, individually, in shared research production and projects, and in other areas of PhD education.

On that score, a lecture on the LEXICON on the topic ‘Reflexicon: designing with future terms’ had previously been given by Andrew on 26 June 2020 to the PhD school hosted by our project partner PoliMi entitled Designing in Transitional Times. Experiments for futures(s) imagination, 22-26 June 2020. See: PhD programme in Design at PoliMi

A gif of the REFLEXICON digital interactive tool

Designing with futures terms

REFLEXICON builds on the Lexicon of the Future Education and Literacy for Designers, and invites designers to play with future terms. It uses game play as a way to support designers on use and application of Futures Design terms and reflect on how their design project or activity work might relate to shaping future needs, conditions and challenges. 

The card based REFLEXICON game. Photo Bastien Kerspern 

As the unit 7.2 REFLEXICON notes:

With its three game modes, the REFLEXICON invites designers and designer-researchers to understand how the terms from the Design Futures Lexicon already interact with their practice and how they can strengthen their project work through future-proofing. As the name suggests, playing the REFLEXICON is itself is a reflexive activity: doing so won’t produce results and ideas for a project. This is really about thinking in a deeper way about the practice of design or the work currently underway or planned and how to think reflexively about the nature of design research.

A screenshot of the google document used to structure and facilitate the project’s first online and completely synchronous workshop.

The REFLEXICON was initially designed as a card game for individual or group use in a face to face event. After the lockdown, the The REFLEXICON was redesigned into an interactive digital game, reusing card game-based codes to help explorations with the content or words of Lexicon in a reflexive way. In order to make it possible to play the game in both physical and digital settings, the REFLEXICON page now contains both a print-ready PDF version of the cards and the digital interactive version for online play. 

Engaging in Futures Enquiry in Design, PhD Workshop #2. REFLEXICON
AHO, 13 March 2020
Teachers and facilitators: Andrew Morrison & Palak Dudani

The REFLEXICON workshop was planned as a digital synchronous workshop and conducted over zoom. In order to facilitate the workshop remotely, supporting material such as the digital interactive tool and a video tutorial were designed. The participants also had the option to share their feedback using the feedback form.

The workshop was designed with PhD students in mind. The aim of the workshop was to introduce the students to a design game as a way to question how futures design words work. The game play also encourages students to connect critical reflection and reflexive review as part of their design research practice.

In this post we share how we participants played the REFLEXICON game and their reflections on how it supported them in their design research work.

Screenshot of the REFLEXICON digital interactive tool

Within the workshop, the participants are encouraged to have a short write up of their project before they can begin playing the REFLEXICON. The participants start with the video tutorial to understand the rules and instructions. The RELFEXICON has three game modes and participants can attempt them in any order.

Screenshot of the game mode Introspeculation of REFLEXICON digital interactive tool

Game Mode #1: Introspeculation

The Introspeculation game mode encourages designers to look at how terms from the Lexicon are interlinked – or disconnected – with their project or activity, and how these terms could shape their work or posture as a designer. It prompts players to reflect on the question generated and speculate on how it could be different. Players can iterate by reloading the combination to push the introspection further.

One of the PhD student participants found the combinatorial aspect of the terms interesting saying that “it sharpened my critique of different words”. Another mentioned that they found this game mode “highly relevant” for their work, one of them expressing that “[it helped me] create perspectives on my article/ work”. 

Screenshot of the game mode ‘more or less’ of REFLEXICON digital interactive tool

Game Mode #2: More or Less

More or Less is an ideation game mode, helping designers in levelling the influence of each term from the Lexicon in their project and envisaging how it can transform their design work.

It prompts players to imagine what more or less of this term might change for their practice or their work.

While playing this game mode, PhD students reflected: “when we say more ‘speculative’ does that mean being less critical?” They felt that it was “helpful for me to think about my research in a different way and I can see different things I can not see before the workshop.”

Screenshot of the game mode In Space of REFLEXICON digital interactive tool

Game Mode #3: In Space

The In Space game mode is an inquiry game spatialising the Lexicon in the real world. By inviting designers to look beyond their project, In Space helps in thinking how these terms might be already linked to our everyday life or could relate to it.

The instructions say

Look at what the arrow card is pointing to. Consider the whole environment or a specific element being pointed. Reflect on how the term could be linked to what the arrow is pointing to and might evolve tomorrow, in time.

During feedback discussions, one of the PhD student participants felt that ‘space game [mode] is very helpful for creating scenarios’ while another said that ‘it builds a connection with reality’. A PhD student who’s looking at the role culture within service design reflected how ‘the mode helped me to think more about the change and development of a specific term, which can push me to imagine the relationship between a term’s present and the future.’

A PhD student participant sharing their notes on how they used the physical card game in a digital remote workshop setting. Photo Yue Zou

Discussion and reflections

The PhD participants described playing the REFLEXICON as ‘doodling with words, like a creative method for understanding and issue-making’, and as a ‘a way to expand my thought and encourage me to think about the details of my research’.

What words do the most work for us? When we define words for ourselves, they’re tied to the core concepts we’re going to use. At that time, we have to strike a balance such that the words are general enough to be understood but specific enough for our work (within the discipline we are). 

The PhD students reflected on the use of words, and how ‘words hold different meanings in different disciplines. When working with words, there are questions one has to ask oneself. The game is set-up in a good way to support that.’ Another mentioned the role of words in supporting ‘imagination’ and ‘if you have a word for it, you can think about it’. Going deeper in the use of specific words, one of the participants chose ‘inter-factual’ and said ‘it sharpened my argument on what role it plays in the process as designer.’ Another participant chose ‘reflexivity’ saying how it helps them question the role of ‘reflexivity (and how it) informs the process of my research, it’s significance in my research. What am I doing differently from others and why is it important? We used the terms ‘less’ and ‘more’, it’s a dualistic idea but in my project I have multiple views.’

Prof Amanda Steggell, a choreographer from Oslo National Academy of the Arts attended the REFLEXICON workshop and noted: 

… the instructions of the game appear to be more fluid. For example, the terms, as described, challenge participants/users to find/discover/discuss other descriptions of the terms, more situated in their specific projects, more than less, suited and situated in the world. And not in the least, the lexicon and game can be shared, appropriated, reconfigured and expanded in different ways and means.

Figure 1. Mapping forces of trust and change in the FUTURE LABORATORY. Image credit: Einar Sneve Martinussen. 

The development contributions to the LEXICON and its transdisciplinary content and application in different settings is interestingly illustrated in a design pedagogy and literacies experiment conducted by our colleague at AHO Assoc Prof Einar Sneve Martinussen. The focus was on a design futures laboratory, scenarios, futures languaging and links to a related wider project on digitalurgan living and digitisation strategies. 

Einar ran a semester long master’s course connecting interaction and service design and digital urban life as part of the ‘Futures Laboratory: Experience Norway in 2040’. THis was collaboration with governmental Kommunal- og moderniseringsdepartementet and DOGA, a national centre for Design and Architecture in Norway, drawing on the MInistry’s framings of scenarios for the public sector in 2040. 

As can be seen in the images below, student groups developed four scenarios as part of a team of 23 students, researchers and designers that were then physically built as part of a joint event in Oslo hosted by DOGA. This event drew together interested parties from the public and private sector, our design campus and a mix of design professional and policy makers. The student led attendees through their work, taking questions, engaging in discussion and contributing to as it turned out actual policy changes with the Ministry through the MInister’s attendance and engagement.

The design futures literacies brief included the following: 1) How can we explore and challenge the scenarios through design? 2) How can we make it possible to experience the scenarios today? 3) How can we use design to open up the discussion around the scenarios? 

Students were asked to look at what services citizens would encounter in each situation and how these could be designed in a way that addressed important issues in each scenario.

Today Norwegian society is viewed as having both high trust and a large public sector. The future though is uncertain. So the scenarios were used to frame four different levels of trust as can be seen in Figure 1 above.

These scenarios drew on a method called  ‘Future faceting’ that he and Ted Mathews had developed in their intersectional pedagogies between interaction and service design at AHO. In a full paper at the 3rd International Conference on Anticipation they outline this as follows:

With our study we aim to expand the ways in which design can also contribute with methods for exploring and critiquing the rich possibility-space within broader urban futures. Here, the purpose of prototyping and concept-development is not service- delivery in itself, but using the experiential qualities of designed prototypes to think about facets of possible futures – offering plurality and heterogeneous perspectives. With ‘future faceting’ we see experience prototypes and design interventions as a strategic tool for investigating and broadening urban futures. ‘Future faceting’ brings the lived realities of today into the making of futures, but also brings facets of the future into today – allowing us to question and consider a broader range of urban future trajectories. (Martinussen and Matthews 2019).

In the Future Laboratory what happened was that the scenarios on view included larger and jore specific experience prototypes (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Thematic design and sketch of the four scenario venues, FUTURE LABORATORY. Image credit: Einar Sneve Martinussen. 

This allowed participants to relate to scale and actual scenarios linked to futures and returned to the present and experience some sense of individual and shared response and embodiment but also a variation of perspectives. 

Figure 3. Physical embodiment of the four scenarios for the exhibition, FUTURE LABORATORY. Image credit: Vegard Hartmann. 

Students also reflected critically on their own processes of making and learning at this event at DoGA but also at the Digital Sjølråderett – Design for a Nordic digital shift conference hosted by Einar at AHO at which they made plenary presentations. They observed that it was interesting to see how they had had an influence on policy but that it was through sharing actual experience prototypes that they saw their one design future literacies as having more immediate and potentially long lasting effect on understanding futures change, design and daily living.

Einar embedded matters of language, multimodal discourse, scenarios and futures literacies across this course. This extended also into collaboration with James Bridle who has been a frequent researcher and educational visitor to AHO. Part of this collaboration included a focus on language and matters of trust, leading to On related aspects of the experiment, EInar hs an article in Medium on the focus on trust and the related student book Trust is Work.

The course built on ongoing work with students Einar had presented in his Keynote ‘Design for a nordic digital shift’ at the 3rd International Conference on Anticipation. 

Einar has also written up this design future literacies experiment in an article we co-authored with AHO colleagues available in the Special issue Temes de Disseny #36. Design Futures Now: Literacies and Making, co-edited with our project partners at ELISAVA.

See also for further collaboration and projects with DOGA: Experience the future.

Figure 1 (left) REFLEXICON. Two cards showing timescales and a specific term “Speculative”. Photo by Bastien Kerspern. Figure 2 (right) Lexical tagging of traditional costumes from Setesdal (front view). National Cultural Historical Museum in Oslo.

Lexicons, Literacies and Design Futures

The LEXICON is featured in a peer reviewed article in the special issue of the multilingual international design journal Temes de Disseny #36 on Design Futures Now, jointly edited with our ELISAVA partner.

Morrison, Andrew; Bjørnstad, Nina; Martinussen, Einar Sneve; Johansen, Bjørn; Kerspern, Bastien & Dudani, Palak. (2020). ‘Lexicons, literacies and design futures’. Temes de Disseny, No. 36, pp. 114-149.

ABSTRACT

As the world in which we live becomes more complex and contested, economically and politically but also in terms of rapid and long-lasting environmental change, design education faces new demands and challenges. We frame and situate these in terms of what we call “design futures literacies.” At stake in such a framing is a rethinking of design’s priorities in the context of climate change and resource use and reuse in futures that are uncertain, contingent and emergent. The article positions design as having shifted away from a techno-modernist design solutionism and to how it may engage in shaping futures through experimentation and exploration in the critical and productive engagement with techno-cultural life. These arguments are located within the prior experience of the transdisciplinary team of co-authors as well as a European level project between four leading design universities. The article takes up their first work package on the co-creation of a Lexicon for Design Futures Literacies and early experimentation towards generating resources and experience for its wider use. The article addresses the largely under articulated relations between language and design (from lexis to discourse). First, we present the development of an alphabetic, lexical semantic set and core grouping of design and futures terms. This vocabulary, drawn from a range of sources and experiences, is linked to the design of a related lexically centred card game. Second, the focus on vocabulary was extended to a section on situating lexis in cultural historical contexts, 3-dimensional haptic form giving and the language of abstraction. This was achieved via reference to a design narrative fiction experiment on emerging technologies and a historical costume annotation project as a prompt for making connections between items from the lexicon and modelling abstract forms in clay. Third, in collaboration with a government ministry and a design council, students developed four future digital urban living scenarios with trust as their central focus. “Languaging” the future was embodied in physical scenarios open to the public, connected to a professional seminar and to international research events where verbal descriptions, explanations and reflections were voiced by the students alongside their educator-researcher. The article closes with suggestions that there is further opportunity for attention to lexis and multimodal discourse modes in shaping design futures literacies, within and across the project but also in practice, in policy and for and as design pedagogy.

For PDF article:
https://raco.cat/index.php/Temes/article/view/373847/468058

Connecting the LEXICON to Master’s in Choreography

Amanda Steggell is a Professor of Choreography at Oslo National Academy of Art and project leader of AMPHIBIOUS TRILOGIES project. As part of ongoing collaboration between AMPHIBIOUS TRILOGIES and FUEL4DESIGN: Future Education and Literacy for Designers, these series of workshops aimed to contribute to the DESIGN FUTURES LEXICON with movement words, called FUTURES DESIGN MOVEMENTS WORDS. 

Prof. Steggell held the three workshops with her Master students in choreography at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). The workshops were designed as an experiment to elicit engaged responses to the masters spring course, with a special focus on project descriptions. The workshop was online and held synchronously over ZOOM. 

The workshops aimed to engage the master students through FUTURES DESIGN MOVEMENTS WORDS and look at how the student participants can contribute with more moving words. In this post we summarise how choreography students approached this through DESIGN FUTURES LEXICON activities and resources and applied it to their discipline of Choreography.

A map of concepts made as part of the student participant’s reflection and analysis after the workshops. The student participant  made the map as a way to tidy up and gather words for their project description. Photo Lisa Colette Bysheim

Workshop #1 Moving with verbs

Moving with Verbs, Master’s Workshop #1
KHiO, 27 April 2020
Teacher and facilitator: Prof. Amanda Steggell

As Prof. Steggell’s notes in her blog post ‘this workshop is an experiment to elicit engaged responses to the masters spring course, with a special focus on project descriptions. Words matter in choreographic ideation and communication. Working with words as material provides fuel for co-creative research in the making.’

A screenshot of the first Master’s workshop over zoom, at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Photo Amanda Steggell

Workshop #2: BALLUSION

A series of images from the second Master’s workshop over zoom, at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. The images show how choreography students used plastic bags to imitate a balloon and used other materials at home for this remotely held workshop. Photo Tendai Malvine Makurumbandi

Ballusion! Pop the future, Master’s Workshop #2
KHiO, 4 May 2020
Teacher and facilitator: Prof. Amanda Steggell

This workshop looked at the use of words and Prof. Steggel notes in her blog post ‘how we think, move and make metaphors that may shape our futures choreographic projects. To do this we draw on the notion of BALLUSION, a made up word to create a design futures metaphor. It conjoins Balloon and Illusion. The future may be inflated, or expanded. The future may be a faction (blending fact and fiction) or an illusion. It may be a mix of these.’

Workshop #3: OCTOPA’s Toolkit: Voicing the future through personas

A screenshot of the third Master’s workshop over Zoom, at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, showing how the choreography students engaged with the workshop using paper cut outs and other materials at home for this remotely held workshop. Photo Amanda Steggell

Master’s Workshop #3
KHiO, 15 May 2020
Teacher and facilitator: Prof. Amanda Steggell

For the third workshop, Prof. Steggell took up work that began in the previous years on OCTOPA. As she notes in her blog post, ‘this time the focus was on using design futures words and language and movement vocabularies to engage with the persona and by extension in her travels in OCTOPA’s JOURNEY.’

A screenshot of blog post titled Rhizome, nexus and vector, from the  Amphibious Trilogies website

Design literacies, creative writing and research futures 

Part of the work in the LEXICON has been carried out in a three way collaboration between AHO, our project designer Bastien Kerspern of Design Friction design studio in France and Prof Amanda Steggell of KHiO, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts In Oslo. This work was centred on connecting the futures facing terms and contexts of the LEXICON to matters and contexts of movement in our joint membership in the Amphibious Trilogies, a project that is led by Amanda, based at KHiO, under the National Artistic Research Programme (NARP) in Norway. 

In this partnership, one interest has been on developing inputs and uses of futures words and settings and dynamics in which they may be seen as relating to movement as shown in the Lexicon UNIT 2.6 FUTURES DESIGN AND MOVEMENT and the related FUTURES DESIGN MOVEMENT WORDS. 

A second interest has been to delve into ways in which futures design literacies may be elaborated and situated critically in terms of the context and environments in which they are cast, crafted and communicated. This is central to how the LEXICON relates to the intentions and activities of the project’s FUTURE PHILOSOPHICAL PILLS. 

A third interest, and that covered more fully here, has been to explore ways futures design and language may be linked with the design fiction, scenarios, personas and movement. This has principally been realised through our design fiction persona OCTOPA and her travels in relation to the Northern Sea Route. Our design fiction device OCTOPA’s JOURNEY provides a satirical gameplay for users.

A gif of the OCTOPA interactive game tool

The LEXICON addresses design futures literacies for master’s and doctoral students in design. In this regard I was invited by Prof Ingrid Halland at the Institute of Design at AHO. Prof. Halland works specifically to support AHO’s PhD Programme, to contribute a lecture on research and creative writing to a PhD class joined with an elective for master’s students as part of a lecture series entitled ´Objects of Research’. 

In making a presentation and inviting discussion on OCTOPA’s JOURNEY in particular, I was fortunate to follow the very carefully positioned work by Anne Kockelkorn, co-director of the Master of Advanced Studies in History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich. 

A screenshot of blog post on The passage of co-design fiction and the NSR from the  Amphibious Trilogies website

In my talk I led the class to a section About the Northern Sea Route, and also The passage of co-design fiction and the NSR. I tried to elaborate on relationships and motivations for inquiring into, making and sharing through an interplay of matters of Scenarios, satire and survival.

A screenshot of the blog post titled Scenarios, satire and survival from the Amphibious Trilogies website

That last post noted that:

With OCTOPA and the 28 scenarios we co-devised, we wanted to escape ghosts and monstrous sea creatures. Instead, the being of a multi-brained, many armed and shape shifting character would demand of us similar tenacity, regenerative acts, distributed and connected thinking and an ability to move amphibiously, literally and physically.

One is increasingly asked for independent feedback on educational interventions and pedagogies, so i offer this extract from a mail from Ingrid that was referring to the projects’ material more broadly on design fiction, OCTOPA and the cross over between the FUEL4DESIGN and Amphibious Trilogies: 

Andrew, your post was absolutely amazing! You went through so many of the aspects and dilemmas that we will discuss throughout the semester. Everyone in the room continued to talk 20 minutes after you logged out of Zoom, because the discussion was so exciting.

I’m glad to hear you’re working in a pretty radical way. I especially liked your comment “all research is fiction”.

I had said this wryly, in the spirit of working with pastiche, satire and a gameplay ‘logic’ to propose, promote, provoke and project questions through design fiction. I also alluded to the ways in which research is always rhetorical, in its persuasive and argumentative forms and means as well as in its processes of making and remaking.

In times of institutional, presidential and ideological fake news, and strategising – whether in geo-politics or in terms of race and the decolonising of media, design, language and literacies – this needed saying so. This was because the regenerative, reflexive, critical and pragmatist gendered characteristics, dynamic and knowledge devising OCTOPA allows would not be misread. It was also a point to address where some critics of design fiction parse it’s purposes too literally as not able to solve functionalist needs. Conversely, as almost baroque like device, exceedings her physical form. OCTOPA challenges us to think and to connect and to distinguish words and movement in complex contexts of ahange  that need our design futures imaginary literacies motivation and articulations.

Design fiction in our experience does have a productive communicative and conceptual place in the languaging and imaging, play and movement involved in negotiating the complexities and framing of the Northern Sea Route. That is a passage in itself that is a cipher for the mental and culturally changing constructs we encounter in design futures literacies, climate change and the Anthropocene.  

As was noted by one of the PhD students to the session, this is as much a material, melting and increasingly kinetic passage of terms and views needing to be addressed in acts of decolonising design and prospecting design futures in and as design futures literacies.

A screenshot of the blog post titled Extending Choreographies Amphibiously, from the Amphibious Trilogies website, summarising the presentation made at the NARP Artistic Research Autumn Forum 2020 

This I took up in a LEXICON and FUEL4DESIGN contribution to a final research presentation to the NARP Artistic Research Autumn Forum 2020 on behalf of Amphibious Trilogies. The presentation drew on my extended links to the project through the LEXICON and to the role design fiction may be seen to have in working with futures vocabularies, narrative and creative and critical expression and articulation. An outline of my talk entitled Extending Choreographies Amphibiously may be followed through a set of slides.

Interestingly, these slides were auto generated by WordPress by way of a set of links assembled from the project website as part of the personal-computational in design futures literacies. They were a reminder of the computational alexicograhic experience I’d had earlier in my career as an applied linguist, discourse analyst, media and education teacher and researcher.

A screenshot of the workshop outline and mode of online participation at 9th Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) Symposium at NID Ahmedabad, India, 9-17 October, 2020.

Futures Design, Language and Systems – A Workshop at RSD9

As FUEL4DESIGN project members from AHO, we held a successful workshop on the Design Futures Lexicon at the 9th Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium at NID Ahmedabad, India, 9-17 October, 2020. With the title ‘Futures Design, Language and Systems – Towards languaging pluriversal futures’, the workshop aimed at building an understanding towards ‘languaging’ of futures and open a systems-level enquiry into challenges of imagining alternative and pluriversal futures within design.

Words and language are inextricably linked with a designer’s ability to shape futures, both productively and analytically. This workshop built on the work done within the first work package ‘A Lexicon of Design Futures Literacies’. The workshop focused on introducing a suite of tools curated for an exploration into the role of language within futures design projects. With the long-standing experience of Systems Oriented Design at the Institute of Design at AHO, the workshop raised questions of language discourses, issues of mediations and representations, especially when working on futures with systemic implications.

A screenshot of the Miro board with presentation slides and links to the Design Futures Lexicon resources.

Participants included a mixed group of master students, educators and researchers.

They were introduced to an archive of resources and taken through some activities to build curiosity and familiarise for self-exploration. Miro was used to facilitate the workshop via Zoom in an exclusively online format. It acted as a holistic interface for presentations and a workspace for group work and overall facilitation. This doubled up as a resource and archive for participants to access after the event as well. 

The Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) Symposium is an international conference series started at Oslo 2012. The series has the intention to promote and foster the emerging practices and theory development for systemic design for service systems, social systems, policy development and complex contexts. RSD has been held in Europe and North America and most recently India (online).

A screenshot of the Miro board with participants responding to prompts from the first set of activities when using the FRAMES4FUTURES tool.

The workshop began with sharing the resources from the first two themes within the Lexicon. The participants began with discussing their existing vocabulary when talking about futures. Using a device called FRAMES4FUTURES, participants mapped their words and discussed how those words related to systems design and concepts of complexity, cultures, conditions and communications. 

Words contain within them encoded positions and world views which help us connect and articulate concepts. Words with futures orientation contain potentiality, an open-endedness which affords finding new connections as opposed to simply following them. The next phase of the workshop focused on looking at ‘words as materials’, where the participants were introduced to Lexicon tools such as BALLUSION and REFLEXICON. Using the 50 FUTURES DESIGN WORDS, participants explored new words and definitions and learnt how an explicit futures orientation can influence conceptual affordances implied within words.

A screenshot of the Miro board showing a group workspace. 

In the final phase of the workshop, participants were invited to try out REFLEXICOVID – an interactive game that provokes critical reflexiveness when attempting complex problems in relation with language, futures and systems design. The aim was to give participants an opportunity to create a project brief based on the ongoing complex challenges in the context of COVID-19. This exercise allowed them to apply what they had learned in a practical project setting. 

We thank the participants for joining us for the event and we welcome their inputs and suggestions.

A screenshot of the FUEL4DESIGN twitter feed.