Across Change • Foresight for Design

ahead of change

Why
anticipate
change?

Design conventions depend on conditions that people have already learned. They know how a button behaves, what feedback normally looks or sounds like, how quickly systems respond, where information is usually located, what indicates agency, and what kinds of visual or auditory evidence can be trusted. Those expectations make familiar designs easy to interpret because much of the meaning has already been learned before the encounter begins. Technology, behaviour and culture can change the relationships on which those conventions depend.

Foresight and forecast

Forecasting projects what is likely to happen. Foresight examines several possible futures and their implications. The second is the usable one for design, because a design has to remain legible under more than one outcome.

Horizon scanning

Systematic observation of emerging developments, signals and possible sources of change.

Weak signals

Early, partial or low-visibility indications of change, read before they become trends.

Cultural pattern analysis

Continuities, breaks and recombinations traced across cultural history, technology and natural cycles.

Systems thinking

Relationships and dependencies examined across the whole experience.

Futures literacy

The capacity of a team to use ideas about possible futures to test its own assumptions.