"Designs for Different Futures records the concrete ideas and abstract dreams of designers, artists, academics, and scientists engaged in exploring how design might reframe our futures--socially, ethically, and aesthetically. Centered on ninety-nine innovative contemporary design objects, projects, and speculations, this handbook asks readers to contemplate our cultural attitudes toward technology, consumption, beauty, and the social and environmental challenges we face on both a local and global scale in futures near and far. Thought-provoking projects are explored through interpretive texts and interviews by the designers themselves and the core curatorial team. Interspersed with the project pages are newly commissioned texts by academics, scientists, designers, artists, curators, and futurists that explore wide-ranging issues, from historical visions of the future to the use of biological/living materials in products and production processes"--Description provided by publisher.

Until recently, analysis of the future was left to forecasters and trend experts. Today, however, designers and architects are playing an increasingly important role, creating products and environments that will change the way we live. Design Futures is a thought-provoking exploration of the radical directions that the creative industries are taking. Design expert Bradley Quinn reveals how a new generation of products, materials and surfaces will align design with such areas as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, reinventing the spaces in which we live and work, and how we experience the human body. Featuring interviews with renowned designers, architects and trend forecasters - among them Karim Rashid, Toyo Ito and Li Edelkoort - and over 250 illustrations of futuristic products and concepts, this is a unique guide to some of the twenty-first century’s most compelling ideas.

Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks. Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant new, suburban form.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

The last decade has seen the rise of urban design which has taken a central position in the new agendas for urban regeneration and renaissance. Urban design has moved from marginality to mainstream. The principles espoused by urban designers over the past thirty years are now accepted as key to a better urban environment and as we move towards greater sustainability, different ideas are emerging that are challenging some of the accepted urban design norms; urban design is at a watershed. Urban Design Futures presents essays from an international cast of authors to review progress and explore emerging ideas: should urban design reflect the future rather than recreate the past? What are the new driving forces that will shape urban living and hence urban design in the future? This book explores new concepts and points the way towards a series of urban design paradigms for the twenty-first century.

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Exploring how design can be used for good—prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and affecting positive social change. Good design provides solutions to problems. It improves our buildings, medical equipment, clothing, and kitchen utensils, among other objects. But what if design could also improve societal problems by prompting positive ideological change? In this book, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp survey recent critical design practices and propose a new, more inclusive field of socially minded practice: discursive design. While many consider good design to be unobtrusive, intuitive, invisible, and undemanding intellectually, discursive design instead targets the intellect, prompting self-reflection and igniting the imagination. Discursive design (derived from “discourse”) expands the boundaries of how we can use design—how objects are, in effect, good(s) for thinking. Discursive Design invites us to see objects in a new light, to understand more than their basic form and utility. Beyond the different foci of critical design, speculative design, design fiction, interrogative design, and adversarial design, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp establish a more comprehensive, unifying vision as well as innovative methods. They not only offer social criticism but also explore how objects can, for example, be used by counselors in therapy sessions, by town councils to facilitate a pre-vote discussions, by activists seeking engagement, and by institutions and industry to better understand the values, beliefs, and attitudes of those whom they serve. Discursive design sparks new ways of thinking, and it is only through new thinking that our sociocultural futures can change.

"As Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously observed: ''Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.'' Designers and futurists, it turns out, have a great deal in common. This mutual recognition is reaching critical mass as each comes to appreciate how their respective traditions have much to offer to making urgent change in the world, and even more so, together." - From the Editors'' Introduction Design and Futures is a landmark collection of essays, manifestos and peer-reviewed articles, edited by Stuart Candy (Carnegie Mellon University) and Cher Potter (Victoria and Albert Museum), documenting ''design futures'' discourse and practice around the world. Originally appearing in back-to-back issues of the open access Journal of Futures Studies (Tamkang University Press, Taiwan), the present compilation preserves the original formatting while unifying all 30 pieces between covers for the first time. Topics range from worldbuilding and curriculum design to temporality and decolonisation, as well as new methods and processes that build on over a decade of experiential futures, speculative design and related practices. Design and Futures will be an essential reference for anyone working or studying in either field. Contributors * Danah ABDULLA (Brunel University, UK) * Ahmed ANSARI (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) * Paola ANTONELLI (Museum of Modern Art, USA) * Tina AUER (Time''s Up, Austria) * James AUGER (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal) * Nik BAERTEN (Pantopicon, Belgium) * Ralph BORLAND (Independent Artist and Curator, South Africa) * Tim BOYKETT (Time''s Up, Austria) * Anne BURDICK (Art Center College of Design, USA; University of Technology Sydney, Australia) * Stuart CANDY (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) * Ece CANLI (Independent Scholar, Portugal) * Kuo-Hua CHEN (Tamkang University, Taiwan) * David DELGADO (NASA JPL, USA) * Alida DRAUDT (Strategic Foresight Partners LLC, USA) * Jake DUNAGAN (Institute for the Future, USA) * Tony FRY (University of Tasmania, Australia) * Nik GAFFNEY (FoAM, Belgium) * JJ HADLEY (Slalom, USA) * Julian HANNA (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal) * Dan HILL (Vinnova, Sweden) * Jeanne HOFFMAN (Tamkang University, Taiwan) * Ryan HOGAN (Mozilla, USA) * Jamer HUNT (The New School, USA) * Anab JAIN (Superflux, UK; University of Applied Arts, Austria) * Mahmoud KESHAVARZ (Uppsala University, Sweden) * Matthew KIEM (Independent Scholar, Australia) * Lucy KIMBELL (University of the Arts London, UK) * Kelly KORNET (Kalypso, Canada) * Maja KUZMANOVIC (FoAM, Belgium) * Ramia MAZÉ (Aalto University, Finland) * Alex MCDOWELL (University of Southern California, USA) * Timothy MORTON (Rice University, USA) * Mugendi K. M''RITHAA (Independent Designer-Researcher, Kenya) * Leticia MURRAY (Gensler, USA) * Pedro OLIVEIRA (Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany) * Stefanie A. OLLENBURG (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) * DK OSSEO-ASARE (Pennsylvania State University, USA) * Karla PANIAGUA (CENTRO Advanced Design Institute, Mexico) * Cher POTTER (University of the Arts London; Victoria and Albert Museum, UK) * Luiza PRADO (MeetFactory, Czech Republic) * Aaron ROSA (Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, Germany) * Tristan SCHULTZ (Griffith University, Australia) * Gregory STOCK (Firefly, USA) * John A. SWEENEY (Narxoz University, Kazakhstan) * Maya VAN LEEMPUT (Erasmus University College, Belgium) * Julia Rose WEST (Ancestry, USA) * Lizzie YARINA (MIT Urban Risk Lab, USA) * Liam YOUNG (SCI-Arc, USA) * Leah ZAIDI (Independent Scholar, Canada)

Curated by Jon Sueda and featuring 37 projects by Bay Area and international artists, All Possible Futures is the first of three SOMArts Commons Curatorial Residency exhibitions in 2014. The group exhibition explores the potential of graphic design and celebrates a questioning of boundaries regarding concepts, processes, technologies, and form. Contemporary speculative pieces take the form of both physical objects and restaged installations.

The world we live in is increasingly complex. It throws up complex problems. This book is about tackling them. At ThinkPlace, we’ve pioneered the application of design thinking to complex challenges like climate change, family violence and global malnutrition. We work globally with governments, organisations and communities using a methodology – the Design SystemTM outlined in this book – that has been developed over more than a decade. We bring together different voices and help them to create better futures. If you’re one of those voices, or would like to be, this book is for you. It’s part roadmap, part instruction manual, but mostly it’s a clarion call for a new way of doing things: tackling the world’s biggest problems in a way that brings people together and produces positive, lasting change.