DESIGNLAB’S APPROACH

Responsible Futuring is a way to tackle societal challenges and co-shape the future we want to live in.

The approach strives to:

• Involve all societal stakeholders beyond disciplines and beyond each other’s expertise

• Focus on enabling stakeholders to gain a holistic understanding of societal challenges and framing and re-framing the issues the challenges pose;

• Bring values and norms into play: understanding each other responsibility when shaping solutions; and,

• Strive to anticipate the impact of technology we might develop to tackle a challenge mindful of the implications in the short and long term.

As such, Responsible Futuring is a form of collaborative moral reflection-in-action that enables academics, industry, government, students, and citizens to be aware of their role, reflect on the short-term and long-term impact of ideas and technologies, and ideate potential solutions with moral imagination.

Responsible Futuring is a way to deal with complex societal challenges and positively impact society. DesignLab’s approach is meant to enable societal stakeholders to reflect and understand a societal challenge and shape responsible solutions.

Rather than starting from solutions and technology, our approach starts from society and its challenges. The goal is to enable societal stakeholders to go beyond the boundaries of their expertise and contexts to collaborate and ideate on the challenges societies face.

Applying our approach means undergoing a generative and reflective process that challenges assumptions and highlights each other’s responsibilities.

Responsible Futuring supports placing societal values at the center; gaining deeper insights into the short and long-term implications of our actions.

What does that mean in practice?

It is difficult to find a common language and common ground, without patronising each other. Collaboration in a balanced way is hard, we need ways to adopt attitudes, develop trust; we need holistic understanding when we need to dialogue among disciplines, experiences, and life experiences; we need to find a common way to look at the challenge; moral reflection and anticipation of the impact of technology are often too abstract for practice.

Who is generating responsible solutions?

All the stakeholders, citizens included.

To clarify, stakeholders are societal actors belonging to one of the quadruple helix clusters (i.e., academia, industry, civic society and governmental organisations).

What does it mean to co-shape responsible futures?

It means involving stakeholders and work with them to build future scenarios, reflect on those scenarios and imagine what to develop. Hence, when tackling a societal challenge, we imagine the future by reflecting on the present’s issues, thereby providing an actionable outlook. We strive to shape desirable developments for society, thinking about the long-term implications.

We can never foresee the future. But what we can do: to visualise how the future might look and how it will affect us, through ethical reflection and speculative design.

Why should we involve society at all?

One of the focal drives of DesignLab is to co-design concepts and ideas on technology and other interventions that reflect societal values, norms, and behaviours. Stakeholders have valuable expertise; they are experts. Citizens, too, are experts of their experience. Instead of solely involving stakeholders, we actively engage them to reflect on value dynamics and practice value dynamism. Stakeholders are co-owners of the societal challenge, collaborators and co-actors.

At what level do we do this?

Stakeholders do so at macro, meso and micro level.

At the macro level, multiple forces play a role: the social, political, economic, technological, and environmental factors. All of these forces need to be taken into account when imagining and reflecting on futures. At the meso level, there are various aspects that relate to collective and organisational practices and influence specific future scenarios. At the micro-level, there are individual factors that influence the way we are going to be and feel in the future.

What are the pillars of our approach?

Enabling stakeholders to join forces, making thoughts and ideas tangible to support sense-making, ideate together with moral imagination, promoting citizen ethics and value change.