About the project

FUEL4DESIGN (F4D) supports the discipline of Design and its MA and PhD students and teachers in Higher Education Institutions to productively anticipate critical futures learning needs and change processes through sustained future making.

We live in a world that is increasingly complex. Climate events and the practice of democracy challenge us as citizens. The future is unclear, yet the future has never been predictable. Design is one of the few disciplines that work pragmatically and creatively with the future. It does so through acts of making and projection that aim to produce products, services and interactions beyond the strategies and systems of the here-and-now. 21st-century design pedagogy needs to be urgently reframed in an approach that we call ‘Design Futures Literacy’. This is a literacy that connects teaching and learning to provide an education for young designers for designing for complex tomorrows. This is a matter of Design taking on a far more proactive role in working to anticipate these tomorrows through acts of situated making that understands use and users and Design as working prospectively to look ahead of the immediate or short term (Celi & Morrison, 2018).

Main objectives

The main objectives of the project are to develop, test and implement new approaches and resources to provide learners and educators with innovative and adaptable tools to imagine, perform and enact a plurality of futures by design. This is to equip design learners and educators to deal with real-world issues on techno-digital futures, climate crisis, and political instability. We will connect experimentation and design theory via invention, imagination, speculation, and through design making activities such as via prototyping, scenario building, and foresight.

AHO’s participation

AHO has three primary roles in F4D. As project leader we are responsible for project management and leadership. At the level of work packages, called Intellectual Outputs (IOs) in the ERASMUS+ Strategic partnership programme, we lead two of the six IOs.

IO1 The Design Futures LEXICON
The lexicon builds a bottom-up shared vocabulary to assist, learning, teaching and research into design futures literacies and the role of design in shaping futures

IO6 The Design Futures Manual
This manual assembles and shared the development and general of interlinked elements of the project and its productive relations to wider design futures literacies communities.