Collaborative Futures is an annual, live futures-focused project, which is a part of the Masters of European Design programme, and brings together final year product design students and early career design graduates to collaborate with an external industry partner to critically explore a key societal challenge. This project has been by developed by Kirsty Ross (2018) over the past six years and has been implemented in a range contexts, which includes exploring the future of social services with Hitachi; the future of banking with the Royal Bank of Scotland and, in the most recent iteration, the future of data experience with the Glasgow City Council.

As an experiential learning process that is focused on the development of the students’ professional practice, the underpinning, studio-based pedagogical model scaffolds the students learning whilst seeking to emulate an authentic professional studio culture. as set out in our conference poster, the project takes place over three distinct phases, which each have a set of key deliverables. In phase one the team undertakes a period of discovery and problem-framing - scoping the context through combining a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods to identify key insights pertaining to the project brief. In phase two the team develops and prototypes their concepts - translating the research themes into a family of speculative knowledge artefacts. Typically this includes a physical future-focused world, a suite of future citizens who would populate neighbourhoods within the world, and a set of scenarios that characterise the citizens’ behaviours, attitudes and values and which narrate the interactions between them. These knowledge artefacts are then used as speculative tools in creative participatory workshops to further co-define the research with present-day citizens and stakeholders. In phase three the team delivers a fully realised suite of knowledge artefacts and a set of design recommendations and directions for the industry project partner to take forward in their future work.

The authors theoretically align the model to Lave and Wenger’s (1991,1998) community of practice framework in terms of understanding the discreet communities of practice that develop over the course of the project – both within the internal student-graduate team, as well as across the wider student-graduate industry partner team. Building on this, we have been researching the mediating role design plays here and how the creation of knowledge artefacts within speculative approaches can be used as boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989) and to support the participation of the project partners, stakeholders and citizens.

A key learning for the students are insights into ways of setting up the conditions for successful collaboration, and challenges them to focus and utilise their product design practice not only as a material practice but also, and perhaps more fundamental for speculative design, as a relational and experiential practice when engaging in multi-disciplinary collaboration, and for exploring this notice of proximity both physically and figuratively – in terms of spaces, discourse and time (the past, present and the future), as well as in terms of shifting between a plurality of realities and speculative realities, grounded by the students in their research.