Design practices are becoming increasingly future-focussed, reflecting the complexities of the design challenges that we face. Futures thinking can offer us tools and methods to help with this, but more than that, it might offer us a new way of seeing the world that we design for.
Service designers operate within a user-centred world, where design challenges are driven by human behaviours, attitudes, needs and wants. However, people are always changing; they are shaped by the socio-cultural, technological, political and economic influences of the surroundings they live in. Some of these influences might be predictable or obvious, such as the reduced possibilities to live and work abroad for UK citizens, following their country’s departure from the European Union. They might also be unexpected or subtle, such as changes in online social behaviours following a privacy scandal involving a tech giant.
User-centred designers are masters of researching and understanding the ways in which people behave right now, but design challenges are often complex, everchanging, and rarely do they only exist in the ‘now’. We argue that designers tackle challenges best by considering not only how people behave now, but how external influences change these behaviours and needs over time. In contexts where the pace of change is increasing, service designers must respond by thinking in even longer terms. By exploring futures thinking, designers can create services that are more resilient to potential change, and may even take an active role in shaping the change that affects them.
