Future faceting – Exploring multifaceted urban futures through interaction and service-design

This paper is about exploring how interaction- and service-design approaches can be used in imagining and proposing urban futures. The paper presents an ongoing project on investigating how experiential, prototype-driven design methods from service- and interaction-design can offer new ways of exploring possible futures in today’s increasingly digital, service-driven cities. We have named this approach ‘future faceting’, as it offers a framework for collectively exploring and experiencing multiple facets of future urban life through designed interventions and prototypes. Through future faceting the design of multiple, parallel experience-prototypes together reflect multiple perspectives on future urban life. These prototypes express future possibilities in the present that can be experienced by citizens, designers and urban developers, and can thus contribute to grounding multifaceted futures in the richness and heterogeneity of contemporary urban life. The approach is being developed with a network of researchers, students and designers through workshops, practice-based research and teaching. Across case-studies spanning urban development, mobility, and activism, the project have explored different modes of using prototyping to broaden the horizon of possible urban futures.

See extended abstract here: http://anticipationconference.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Anticipation_2019_paper_62.pdf