Flux Compass designed a scenario planning and rapid prototyping course for students at Hong Kong's fashion and design school SCAD to consider how we might live in 2035, and design their own solutions.
What future challenges should today’s designers anticipate? Here are some of the ones we considered:
- Digital disruption
- Ageing populations
- Pollution of air and water
- Political polarization
- Climate change
- Automation
- Human-Robot relationships.
These trends and many more are converging to create challenging contexts for every sector.
There is no handbook for designing healthy and thriving solutions in such complexity, but it is possible to foresee some of the challenges, spot emerging opportunities, and maximize our resilience. Artists and designers have a transformative role to play in building future societies. They can see beyond current ways of operating, developing new behaviours and business models, as well as new products and materials.
In our workshop, we used these trends to develop various possible scenarios for 2035, then journeyed into these future worlds through the personas of people actually living in the future, to understand what challenges they were up against.
Here some of the students present their future world, and the conceptual solutions they developed:
