RCA Huangyi Future Design Futures is a new major. The future design course aims to help students build knowledge and skills about the future and solve the challenges we face; Imagine and create an ideal future for our lives through design led interventions.

RCA Huangyi Design Futures

Why study Design Futures?

　　 Royal College of Art This course focuses on professional development and action, focusing on research methods and practical strategies. Future design enables you to raise "big questions" about disruptive innovation, design ethics, design resilience, common values, future prediction and safety design.

Who is the right person to apply for Design Futures?

For graduate students and career changers, this course provides core knowledge, elective courses, cooperative work, and customized research project courses, enabling you to select fields of interest, while developing professional skills to realize ideas. It will adopt a "Burst mode" teaching method.

　　• Curriculum of Design Futures:

　　 ◆  First semester

·Study research methods and combine theory with creative practice

·Learn Complex Systems, and be familiar with cybernetics, leverage point, causal cycle, change theory and entanglement

·Select two cross college elective courses from design safety, design innovation, model and life cycle, design ethics, design innovation, etc

　　 ◆  Second semester

·Learn entrepreneurship and transform innovative design or communication concepts into business, management, enterprise and entrepreneurial skills

·Combining future methods with advanced digital analog ideas

·Investigate the society from the perspective of design and work in a multidisciplinary team

·Further select cross college elective courses, including design safety, design innovation, design ethics, and design sustainability

　　 ◆  Third semester

·Review relevant literature, formulate research plans, and complete research projects.

New Professional Design Futures

Design Futures is not a new major, but a branch of Design Products. When RCA was a two-year system, Design Products would divide all students into four platforms in the second year, one of which was Design Future.

When Design Futures is still a branch of Design Products, the teacher explains Design Futures as follows:

The ability to imagine the future is vital to any society. This is not about looking into the future, but about understanding ourselves and our position in history. The events of the past few years have dramatically shown us how unstable we are now - an increasingly unstable world makes the ability to imagine the future even more important.

In Design Futures (DF), we imagine, build, criticize and deliver the possible future. We deconstruct the past and the present to build the world, objects and entities waiting to appear. Design Futures encourages the balance of crazy speculation through rigorous research, and embraces surprise and fear.

These views are still applicable in the current Design Futures major, and students interested in Design Futures can refer to them~

　　 Specific cases of Design Futures:

　　• What if humans fall in love with robots?

Neo robophelia is a speculative design project created by Hye Hyun Song, a graduate of RCA in 2022. It provides a set of tools for new sexual interaction and expanding the feeling between people and machines in the 2070's future.

With the development of technology, we have seen more natural and realistic humanoid animals. There is no doubt that we will have a mixed robot society. Our descendants will come into contact with non-human beings similar to humans from a very young age, and they may establish different relations with us.

Mechanical bride, 2070

This scene starts from the crisis of childcare, and explores the future of human psychology, from the theory of child development to fetishism. The extremely absurd examples of post human society show how human nature and traditional human concepts may change, and question how the audience should consider to welcome the future.

　　• River Nomad 2050

River Nomad 2050 was created by Haochen Zhang, a graduate of RCA Design Futures. The project background Bangladesh is one of the countries most affected by climate change, and 4 million people have been displaced by climate disasters. However, the trend of global warming and frequent extreme weather is still intensifying.

Limitations of official assistance: merely predicting climate risks cannot prevent people from starving, and they need to make a living.

The project tells a fictional story of how people in the Bengal River nomadic community will help each other and maintain their livelihood through frugal innovation and low-cost technology in 2050. The purpose is to arouse the audience to reflect: instead of considering the climate problem itself, should we consider how to provide means to enhance their resilience under the climate crisis, so as to help them live a better life?

Handicrafts: thrifty innovation of local people

I am still unfamiliar with Design Futures, and start from speculative design!

If you are still unfamiliar with future design, you can consider starting from speculative design. Speculative design is the first step for us to contact Design Futures.

　　 Definition and origin of speculative design

The concept of speculative design originated from Professor Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby of the Royal Academy of Arts, who first mentioned speculative design in their 2013 book "Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming".

Speculative design is to take design as a tool for speculation and find out the possibility of things. This form of design is based on imagination, aiming to open up a new perspective for sometimes called strange problems, create space for discussion and debate, and encourage people's imagination to flow freely. Speculation can serve as a catalyst to redefine our relationship with reality.

It can be seen from the definition that traditional design focuses more on a problem, a group of people, a scene or a scenario; Speculative design is more artistic, stimulating people's thinking with design methodology and imagination, rather than focusing on specific problems and specific people.

　　 Thinking about the future in speculative design

Speculative design has long given its own classification and thinking about the "future".

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby gave their definitions of future categories in their book Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Speculative design focuses on the "desirable future".

Agreed future

　　• Probable in the future

As the name implies, the very likely future is "the future that will happen with great probability unless force majeure (huge changes in society or natural environment) occurs". Generally speaking, the design methods, teaching and practice that we have learned and defaulted to are all based on the very possible future.

To a certain extent, the standard for measuring "good or bad" design is also based on this future.

Speculative design work Breathing Dog

　　• Possible future

Unlike the "probable future", it seems that the probable future mainly focuses on scenario planning and future outlook based on existing insights.

Shell, the world famous oil company, has been focusing on those "seemingly possible future" since the 1970s. Shell uses this future analysis based on rational analysis and reasonable imagination to help the company's senior management make better decisions and help the company find more possible development directions.

　　• Possible future

On the premise of not violating the basic principles of science, all possible events are in the category of "possible future", as long as they do not violate science. Typical examples of violations of scientific and physical premises are perpetual motion machines and predictive power.

However, changes in such fields as politics, society, economy and culture may occur, but the probability of occurrence is different from the difficulty of prediction. Forecasting is a hard thing to do.

　　• Favorable future

There is also a "desirable future" between "very likely" and "seemingly possible". "Agreed" is currently defined by the government and industry. Due to the supply and demand relationship, as consumers (people in some countries also act as voters), we have a certain influence on the industry, but this influence is very limited. As a tool that can integrate viewers and participants, can design help people participate more in creating an imaginative and desirable future and become more influential citizens?

In a word, for speculative design, the future is not a destination, but a medium to stimulate imagination. Speculative design does not predict the future, but uses design to open up possibilities. These possibilities can be discussed and used to define a better future for people.

Designers should not directly define the future for people, but cooperate with experts (including ethicists, political scientists, economists, etc.) to discuss, conduct public debate, and create the catalyst people desire for the future.

Students who want to apply for Design Futures can start from understanding speculative design and capture the heart of Professor Design Futures with excellent speculative design projects. If you have more professional questions, welcome to Natural Light Art study abroad consultation.

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