Conference Agenda

How can design help us explore questions of both possible futures ahead of us, and possible futures that never came to pass but continue to affect us? How could thinking about temporalities and dimensions be valuable for designers engaging with transformation, transitions, complexity, and pluriversal approaches to research and practice?

Following popular Conversations at DRS 2022 (‘Designing Transformative Futures’: Light et al, 2022) and DRS 2024 (‘Mapping Constellations for Transformative Futures’: Speed et al, 2024), we propose a third in the series, turning our focus to time and temporalities in design’s relationships with futures. This highly participatory session combines ideas developed through previous Conversations with new perspectives from participants, to arrive at a shared, embodied creative mapping activity. In 2022 (Figure 1, left) with 100 participants, in-person and online, we explored what it feels like to be a designer situated within a world of uncertainties and structural forces, and how questioning our own practices can sow seeds of more radical transformation. In 2024 (Figure 1, centre / right) with 60 participants we used systemic constellation mapping, with participants positioning themselves into ‘constellations’ in which stances on ways the world could—or ought to—be come into tension with other conditions and actors.