Designing for/from the Future

Abstract: This thesis aims to introduce new methods within the field of experience design, an emergent interdisciplinary design discipline, using these methods as tools for debate and for the communication of new design concepts. An important part of the methods come from trendspotting practice and future studies methodology. The backbone of the final project is a “meta-method” which incorporates common methods surveyed so far: the “for/from” method. The first part of the “for/from” method is about designing prototypes and creating fictional narratives to project current trends into the future, the second part is perhaps less structured, but more ambitious, carrying fictional futures to the daily lives, to test and evaluate the scenarios created. Staging experiments and experiences around these proposed methodologies and testing the concepts through workshops forms the core of the proposed design practice. Since the domain of futures thinking is not populated by designers, it is of special importance to me as how designers might find a place in such interdisciplinary teams and how the organizational levels of these so-called complex experiential structures could allow designers to participate. I argue that experience designers not only design customer experiences to please and aestheticize products but they have the power to change people’s (rather than customers’) opinions, using the same tools the field of marketing and exhibition design offers them.