Conference Agenda

Designers, researchers, and innovators are increasingly asked to engage with complex, uncertain futures. While futures studies offer powerful analytical tools, and design provides rich visual and narrative methods, these practices are often separated: futures research can remain abstract, while design speculation risks becoming anecdotal or stylistic. This workshop proposes a structured yet highly visual approach to “sketching futures”, where participants systematically generate supporting and contradicting future scenarios through drawing, categorization, and narrative compression. 

The workshop builds on the premise that futures become legible not through singular visions, but through tensions between desirable and undesirable, dominant and marginal, accelerating and resisting trajectories. By sketching these tensions explicitly, participants learn to use drawing not only as representation, but as a thinking device for futures inquiry. 

Using a step-by-step process reflected in the accompanying diagram, participants will move from early signals and metaphors to structured future segments, and finally to single-image narratives and counter, sketches that articulate both positive and harmful futures, and the conditions that produce them.