Our approach

Future thinking

Strategic futures is the practice of exploring possible, probable, and preferable futures to guide better decisions today. In our lab, we use strategic futures to expand design horizons - helping individuals and organisations look beyond short-term targets and engage with long-term change. This might mean exploring alternative paths through emerging technologies, identifying systemic risks, or imagining how products, services, and systems could evolve over time. Futures thinking isn’t about prediction - it’s about preparation, imagination, and agency. It helps us ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and build solutions that are more resilient, inclusive, and future-facing.

Multi-scope approach

Realising better futures demands more than a single lens. Our work takes a multi-scope approach that investigates people, processes, and practice as interlinked areas of transformation. We use sustainable design tools to respond to immediate challenges, while also developing broader strategies to reshape the systems we design within. This layered approach allows us to tackle complex problems from multiple angles - working across timeframes, disciplines, and scales to generate both grounded and visionary design outcomes.

People

We explore how designers and engineers will work in the future: what roles they will play, the systems they’ll operate within, and the values that will shape their decisions. As technologies and societal expectations evolve, so too will the identities and responsibilities of design professionals.

Our work investigates emerging professional archetypes, new models of collaboration, and the social and organisational contexts in which future innovators will operate. This includes asking: Who will design the future? What kinds of leadership, ethics, and capabilities will they need? And how can we support them?

Process

We investigate how designers and engineers can consider the future in their approaches and day-to-day decision-making. This includes embedding futures thinking into design and engineering frameworks, processes and mindsets - to support long-term strategy, expand innovation capacity, and guide transitions to sustainability.

We explore how organisations can use these approaches to widen their horizons, empower their teams, and create space for reflective, exploratory, and systemic thinking. Our goal is to equip people not just to design things - but to design directions. 

Practice

We consider how design can actively shape more sustainable, equitable, and meaningful futures - through what is made, how it's made, and why it matters. Our research looks at the tools, materials, and methods used by practitioners and asks how these can evolve to better serve both people and planet.

We explore emerging areas of design application, from future consumption and social innovation to speculative environments and intergenerational legacies. By supporting new forms of practice, we aim to help designers build futures worth inheriting.