Anticipation and Design Inquiry

Anticipation and Design Inquiry
Manuela Celi and Andrew Morrison
Abstract
Inquiry into anticipation is framed within this chapter in a view from Anticipation
Studies not only Science, accentuating cultural, constructionist and critical inter-
pretative aspects. In this theoretical excursus, authors argue that Futures Studies
needs to more fully take up a body of work from Design Studies. Drawing on
various aspects of Design inquiry, the chapter provides an overview of some of
the approaches that have been advanced and ways they might offer Anticipation
Studies routes and means to more fully framing approaches to the making and
analysis of anticipatory systems, engagements, and reflections. As designer-
researchers with academic transdisciplinary backgrounds, our views are posi-
tioned from the work of others as well as via practice based research through
design epistemological investigations. Design Futures remains a fruitful space for
further design inflected inquiry.
Keywords
Anticipation studies • Design inquiry • Design Futures • Additive design (ADD) •
Speculative design • Design fiction
Contents
Matters in Framing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Anticipation and Design: Toward a Research-Based View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Design, Anticipation, and Knowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Design and Anticipation as Vision Providers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
M. Celi (*)
Dipartimento di Design, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
e-mail: manuela.celi@polimi.it
A. Morrison
Centre for Design Research, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: AndrewDavid.Morrison@aho.no
# Springer International Publishing AG 2017 1

R. Poli (ed.), Handbook of Anticipation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_49-1
2 M. Celi and A. Morrison
Design and Anticipation as Agents of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Advance Design: A Framework for Connecting Design and FS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Potential Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Advance Design: The Project Driven/Led by Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
ADD, Up-Framing, and Reframing Capacity: From Planning to Anticipating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Forward with Speculative Design! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Speculation and Design Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
A View on Futures and Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Design Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Matters in Framing
Much of the focus on anticipation (Poli 2010, 2014a, b; Nadin 2015) arises out of
earlier work in Future Studies (FS) and previous conceptualization of anticipation in
the natural sciences (Rosen 1985/2012), cognitivist psychology, and systems views
(Nadin 2015). One notable gap in the genesis and promulgation of FS has been a lack
of attention to one of the primary knowledge domains that has been working toward
understanding and shaping future contexts, experiences, scenarios, and engagement,
namely Design (Stolterman and Nelson 2012). Internationally, Design, also called
Design Studies (DS), has gained purchase, momentum, and impact as a central site
of transdisciplinary inquiry (e.g., Stuedahl et al. 2010). While the somewhat surpris-
ing omission of design in FS until recently has partly been due to the force of
important founding interests in FS, such as planning and strategy development, it
may also be partly due to the at times complex trajectories of the development of
Design during a similar period, one that has increasingly been realized through the
interplay of theory and practice in poststructuralist modes of inquiry.
In contrast to its early assertions to be a science – and this is a perspective that still
matters – today Design may also be characterized as working abductively, in contrast
to the epistemological approaches of most work in anticipation conceptualized
within the natural sciences. Design also has creative, collaborative constructivist
foundations and today these need to engage increasingly with complexity and
emergence, such as tackled by Systems-Oriented Design (e.g., Sevaldson 2013).
We see Anticipation as the shared domain between FS and Design, and this chapter
aims to make this more apparent by accentuating Design’s characteristics and
contributions to Anticipation along with its connections with FS. This chapter is
presented as an attempt to formulate a bridge between FS and Design as one of the
possible means of building a more elaborated perspective and transdisciplinary mode
of inquiry for what we see as Anticipation Studies, as, for example, has been
developed in transdisciplinary humanistic and social science inquiry in Cultural
Studies and New Media Studies. Our intention is to complement what we might
term a more “Anticipation Sciences” view that has a genesis in cognition and
systems, one that we acknowledge as providing important insights. Our focus is
more on design as cultural, negotiative, and constructionist. As Appadurai (2013:
Anticipation and Design Inquiry 3
299) reminds us, the future is “. . . a space for democratic design that must begin with
the recognition that the future is a cultural fact.” Below we unpack ways in which
design operates to help realize, problematize, and shape futures in terms of antici-
patory practices and analyses, not necessarily solution-driven world views and
related notions concerning making and interpretation.
We therefore see a need to present a broad view on design inquiry as a key
foundation for Anticipation. Our view here is not to provide a ghettoized version of
Design, but the opposite; it is to offer the transdisciplinary and emergent knowledge
domain area of Anticipation a detailed account of what Design inquiry has to offer
inquiry into the future and into “making futures” that recently has not been very
present in FS research. It is important that this is understood from the outset and the
offering we make is to extend and complement existing work in futures to also entail
Design. Those who are unfamiliar with research in Design, and this has expanded
and been professionalized enormously in the past two decades, may fall into the trap
of characterizing it only as “gilding the lily.” We present design as more than this, as
reaching far beyond guilds of practice, or lily-livered and tentative analyses located
only in other disciplinary frames.
Design inquiry is now at the forefront of engaging in the complexity, risk,
innovation, critique, and cultural expression that are central to contemporary and
projected experience, engagement, and critique. There are expansive research com-
munities – with conferences, journals, programs, projects, and publications as well
as a host of outputs and outcomes that meet twenty-first century-mediated commu-
nicative living and experience. These span human–computer interaction as well as
service design, systems-oriented design, and product (not only industrial design) as it
realigns its practices and interpretation to increasingly account for digital fabrication,
alongside the growth of socially mediated communication and design’s role on
social innovation and pressing societal and sustainability issues. Futures Studies
has not integrated all these perspectives in its concerns and there is great potential for
further engagement and elaboration between FS and DS.
Much design inquiry is not known outside of design, and, though it is prevalent
within many disciplines, this chapter, therefore, needs to include a fair deal of
presentation of DS; design inquiry is also often misunderstood in terms of earlier
drives to establish design as a science (e.g., Simon 1969) while today it is a mix and a
mesh of disciplines, a domain in its own right and increasingly a central mode of
constructive, creative knowledge making and building that draws on production
based and research through design approaches that work projectively, prospectively,
and abductively and should not and we would argue cannot simply be read off the
frames of other disciplinary and epistemological interests and conventions. Design
reaches for what is not yet realized. It provides means to shaping futures and to
practices that are not solution centered. Instead, these sociomaterial constructions,
framed as design ecologies, that seek to arrive at new conceptualizations and
emergent means through exploratory, investigative, and problem-making activities,
often shared, typically transdisciplinary and adaptively, created through a mesh of
legacies, shared knowing, coproduction, and critical interpretation.
It is the shift to conceptualizing futures thinking, making, and critical analysis in

terms of anticipation – influenced by concepts and work in foresight and the building
of affordances for working with emergence and complexity together, as well as
developing futures literacies to enact and enable their critical, situated, and reflexive
realization – that offers those of us concerned with “shaping futures” to include
knowledge and experience from design. This chapter therefore aims to elaborate
linkages between emergent research concerning anticipation and a body of related
work located in design-based inquiry. For us, we begin by stating that in essence,
design may be seen as anticipation.
In the past decade, we have witnessed a shift in design-based inquiry from being
about professional education and production-centered practice to an emergent
and many-sided research domain in its own right. Design inquiry is now both
established as a domain of inquiry in its own right with key journals such as Design
Issues, Design Studies, The International Journal of Design, Design and Culture,
and CoDesign and related conferences such as DRS, Nordes, IASDR, and CUMU-
LUS as well as having more specialist venues such as ServDes, contributions,
and special interest groups in Conferences such as DIS and Systems-Oriented
Design (RSD) transdisciplinary contributions to fields such as Human Computer
Interaction (HCI), digital media, materials science, anthropology, and business
innovation. In this research, futures thinking, social innovation and creative, cultur-
ally and sociotechnically framed making, and links between design tools and
research methods are central.
Despite these varied and genuinely discipline crossing legacies and research
frames of Design and FS, their processes often share similar objectives but approach
them from different perspective and with different strategic positions. Design may be
seen as the manipulation of visual or tangible aspects of physical matter or informa-
tion at the point of output while FS is seen as an activity oriented to policy that
occurs in advance of actual outcomes and that is very distant from a concrete
realizations. Despite these differences, Design and FS have some tools and lan-
guages in common and they are equally concerned with future scenarios and the
ability to make informed decisions to enhance success. These disciplinary proxim-
ities becomes more evident if we consider the more recent context and emergence of
what Miller et al. (2013) defined as the Discipline of Anticipation (DoA):
All efforts to “know the future” in the sense of thinking about and using the future are forms
of anticipation. Equally the future is incorporated into all phenomena, conscious or uncon-
scious, physical or ideational, as anticipation. The DoA covers all “ways of knowing” the
later-than-now as anticipation, from those forms of anticipation that are observed, for
instance, in a tree that loses its leaves in the Autumn to human planning that attempts to
colonize the future and efforts to make sense of emergent novelty in the present by finding
inspiration in systemically discontinuous imaginary futures. Looked at as a “way-of know-
ing” the DoA addresses the codification of the myriad of systems of anticipation, both
conscious and non-conscious. The DoA develops, sorts, and diffuses descriptions of the
processes/systems of anticipation or how the later-than-now enters into reality. (Miller et al.
2013, p.3)
We see Anticipation as a transdisciplinary construct comprised of and composed

through a mix of specializations, knowledge domains, and practices. It extends into
the social sciences, humanities, and creative industries. Here the framing of DoA is
that it is about multiple, blended, and various ways of knowing. This is what Design
offers Anticipation alongside other more formal academic disciplinary contributions
such as from narrative or strategic planning. Design, dealing naturally with many
different disciplines, communicates with a variety of stakeholders, creators of
models, and prototypes, and adopting and adapting different languages occupies a
dialectical space between the world that is and the world that could be. The Design
discipline, far away from the sole shapes moulder, actually finds application in a
multitude of contexts – such as Service Design, Social Design, Design for Cultural
Heritage, User-Centered Design, Design Futures, Sustainability, etc. – that heavily
influence the quality of our lives and our common futures.
However, we see that the anticipatory nature of design is itself under articulated
within Design Studies as the academic strand of design inquiry is sometimes labeled.
Zamenopoulos and Alexiou (2007) are among very few scholars who have
addressed the anticipatory nature of design. After initial exploration of diverse
approaches to anticipation in different fields, Zamenopoulos and Alexiou (2007)
suggested an anticipatory view of design as a paradigm to interpret and redefine the
design discipline:
[. . .] Design can thus be associated with the capacity to generate theories and models that
bring beliefs and desires into correspondence [. . .]. More importantly, design also involves
the capacity to anticipate the correspondence between theories and models, which can only
be verified by experimentation or the actual realisation of the design artefact. (Zamenopoulos
and Alexiou 2007 p. 423)
It is this activity of artifacting – whether it be a physical product, an intangible

service, or an emergent process – that concerns design. Experimentation is central,
but it needs to be understood as distinct from the formalism of STEM-centered
inquiry. Designing is a socially, technically, and culturally framed activity that
occurs in contexts of creativity and communication, where commercial and civic
characteristics vary and veer toward and away from one another, not always
connecting and cohering. Central to that activity are notions and practices of
emergence, generativity, iteration, and usability so that the making of artifacts and
the knowledge gleaned thereby is framed in dynamic and reflexive assemblages and
relations between design techniques and research methods. Design thus embeds
ontologies of future thinking in its artifacting and the materialization of artifacts
while at the same time, and again and again, it works to engage in processes of
knowledge generation through production in which participation and cocreativity are
frequently central.
For us, working in basic and applied research approaches to design, anticipation
as it is epitomized by Poli (2010) is not a feature that we – designers and designer-
researchers in this case – alone possess. Nor do we do so separately to its realization
by other cultural agents; anticipation is a widespread phenomenon. Indeed, we
argue, anticipation needs to be understood in terms of systems views and from our
disciplinary location, also increasingly in terms of Systems-Oriented Design
(Sevaldson 2013). There are many systems containing predictive models: life in all
its varieties is anticipatory, the brain works in an anticipatory way, society and its
structures are anticipatory, even nonliving or nonbiological systems can be antici-
patory (Poli 2010 p.8). Probably the anticipatory nature of design is not surprising
for futurists, what is interesting – in a transdisciplinary perspective – is the way in
which the projection capabilities of design may be useful in other context. Design
shapes futures, bearing in mind the past experience starting from the present condition
and criticalities that call for intervention; design has the unique ability to transform
these interventions into material and immaterial forms (Margolin 2007 p. 4).
How can we analyze, codify, or explain the Design contribution in future-oriented
projects? This contribution aims at clarifying at different levels of abstraction the
anticipatory action of design making more visible the potential relationship between
Design and Anticipation. We next present a research-oriented overview of relations
between Anticipation and design. We then move to cover two domains we see as
providing means and methods for developing these linkages: Advance Design as a
framework providing Up-framing and Reframing capacity and Speculative design,
with focus on narrative and design fiction.
Anticipation and Design: Toward a Research-Based View
Beyond the conceptualization or misrepresentation of Design as a pragmatic activity

dedicated to producing artifacts – from the most material spoon to the city (as E. N.
Rogers taught to us) to the immaterial software – it is vital that Design be understood
to exist as a research discipline. Since the first attempt to consider design as a science
(Simon 1969; Gregory 1966; Alexander 1971), awareness of the roles and relations
of Design researchers and practitioners has changed considerably. This has been so
regarding both on the nature and the range of the intellectual contribution of the field
of Design-based inquiry.
Considering Design as a way to produce concepts, knowledge, and theories, we
must bear in mind that in the field of design research we can distinguish these
approaches:
1. Research on design often accomplished by specialists from other disciplines as

history, psychology, economy, semiotics, etc. that consider Design as the object
of the research: they may consider the history, the diffusion of this practice at the
macroscale as well as analyze design objects, actors, or production processes at
the microscale.
2. Research for design mostly performed by designers but frequently powered by
transdisciplinary research is represented by approaches that aim at nourishing a
concrete.
3. Design projects. Consider for example all the context, psychological, medical,
and technical information needed to design a medical device.
4. Research through design, which generates knowledge by/while adopting a design

approach, meaning that the activity of designing artifacts (more or less con-
sciously) is a way of learning and that in a meta-knowledge system represents a
way to uncover, or better let insights and new concepts emerge.
The expression “Research through design,” first coined by Christopher Frayling

(1993/4), has further been defined as practice-led research, action research, or
project-grounded research (Findeli 2000). Believing that this form of research is a
variant of design research with an accent on theory, Findelli highlights the role of
creativity and claims its independence from the other discipline.
Design, Anticipation, and Knowing
Research through design means research projects that generate knowledge by

adopting a design approach. This point of view frames Design with its peculiar
way of operating and building knowledge. We must clarify that it is necessary to
distinguish designerly ways of knowing from Design Thinking (with origins in
business and innovation studies) that in our view is something by now external to
design. As Deserti and Rizzo (2014) underline, design thinking is moving away from
design practice by employing formalized processes and techniques that can be
applied by professionals of all disciplines, not necessarily by designers. In this
acceptation, Design Thinking is actually separating the process of conceptualizing
ideas from that of actually making things while enforcing the idea that there exists
some sort of capability or competence – maybe the abused “creativity” – that
precedes or can be divorced from knowledge on how to make things. So while
Design Thinking is often the extrapolation of design tools, methods, approaches, and
their appropriation by other disciplines, contexts, and policies, it is important to note
that it differs very greatly from the concept of “designerly way of knowing.” In 1979,
Cross wrote that:
The sciences value objectivity, rationality, neutrality, and a concern for the ‘truth’ [...] The
humanities value subjectivity, imagination, commitment and a concern for ‘justice’. The
designerly way of knowing involves a combination of knowledge and skills from both
science and the humanities [...] Design has its own distinct things to know, ways of knowing
and ways of finding out about them. (Cross 1979 in Frascara 2002: 160)
The idea highlights the importance of design as an epistemological stance stating

that designing artifact is a unique way of providing insights and theories.
As well as the Anticipation domain, Design has long struggled with the necessity
of defending its academic and comparisons with the hard sciences. Cross (2001: 51;
citing several authors (Alexander 1964; Gregory 1966; Simon 1969, respectively),
epitomizes this as follows:
Scientists try to identify the components of existing structure. Designers try to shape the
components of new structures. (Alexander 1964, p. 130).
The scientific method is a pattern of problem-solving behaviour employed in finding out the
nature of what exists, whereas the design method is a pattern of behaviour employed in
inventing things. . ., which do not yet exist. Science is analytic; design is constructive.
(Gregory 1966, p. 6)
The natural sciences are concerned with how things are . . . design on the other hand is
concerned with how things ought to be. (Simon 1996, p. 114).
Today Design is not seen only in terms of scientism and functionalism nor is it
understood by examining construction alone. Design-based inquiry is acknowledged
as working through its own designerly means that encompass a variety of
tools, techniques, and creative processes in tandem with other research methods
and analytical frames. Here the “designerly” refers to a complex of ways of working
abductively between design techniques, such as sketching prototyping and
envisioning, and research methods, spanning a range of applications suited to
context, culture, and need. Recent writings in FS have also attested to
abductive methods in working with futures-oriented research (Patokorpi and
Ahvenainen 2009).
For Design Research, it is the weave of these elements that enacts a knowledge
that is built through reshaping and reassessing what is often an array of possible and
potential options and paths, artifacts, and processes that are pitched beside and
against one another. These placements and positioning are used to help sift and
sort, compare and contrast, and are in effect decision-making activities that may
seem unstructured and even overelaborated from the outside. For the designer,
design team and designer-researcher, such activities of designing are dynamic
bearers of brokers of knowledge: selections from among options are made, routes
to materialization of artifacts of various types are identified, and followed critically
and iteratively. However, the process and its many elements provide a context for
wider reflection in and on action, less deliberate and more contextual than is often
understood by merely studying an ensuing product or process. Holistic, systems-
oriented understanding is thus central to Design inquiry and knowledge building and
perhaps most notably because it engages us in looking into and critically mapping
out complex conditions and relations that impact on acts of designing and situations
of use (Stuedahl et al. 2010). In this sense, twenty-first century Design engages in a
weave of relations and processes that shuttle between the material and the immate-
rial. Anticipation-oriented inquiry can productively encompass such approaches in
order to reach into the needs and demands of engaging productively and prospec-
tively in a world increasingly characterized culturally, economically, technically, and
politically by complexity, uncertainty, and contest.
Although there are a number of differences in the origins and practices of Design
and FS, Design, FS, and their intersections around and through Anticipation share
some similarities. They have to do with knowing, investigating, understanding, and
creating images and alternatives of the already unknown and the unknown but not
yet ready. Ultimately, this is a matter of shaping futures. Design and Anticipation
share common tools such as trend analysis, scenarios, narratives, personas, and
prototypes (Mörtberg et al. 2010; Morrison and Chisin 2017). Most of all, though,
they are coupled by a particular form of scientific enquiry and explanation: an
approach to science which takes the view that complex realities (or systems) can
be better understood by studying their organizational principles, rather than building
descriptions of their structural components (Zamenopoulos and Alexiou 2007, p. 1).
This may be related to, and at times contrasted with, more socioculturally framed
views that are centered on cocreation, participation, and critical interpretation. These
are approaches and practices drawn from disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences, but also through their relational systems, formations, and assemblies in
transdisciplinary-based design inquiry (Morrison et al. 2010; Bratteteig et al. 2010).
Understanding Anticipation with reference to the Design field requires reading
and explaining Design on the basis of the organizational conditions and features that
underlie Design as a system of knowledge. While design may have struggled for
some time to legitimate itself and a disciplinary domain, Design is not simply a
science. Design is comprised of a wide variety of disciplinary relations and linkages,
borrowings, and mergers that characterize it as transdisciplinary (Morrison 2010).
In this sense, it is well prepared to become one of the core contributors to the
emergent field of Anticipation Studies. Importantly, Design entails both construction
and critique in knowledge building.
A contribution that has framed the nature of design greatly contributing to the
explanation of the design phenomenon is the powerful definition of “design as
reflective practice” by Donald Schön. It is particularly interesting to compare
Schön’s description of the designers’ reflection defined as “knowing in action” and
the Rosen’s definition of an anticipatory system. For Schön:
When the practitioner reflects-in-action in a case he [she] perceives as unique, paying

attention to phenomena and surfacing his intuitive understanding of them, his [her]
experimenting is a once exploratory, move testing, and hypothesis testing. The three
functions are fulfilled by the very same actions. (Schön 1987, p. 72).
Rosen writes, “An anticipatory system is a system containing a predictive model

of itself and/or its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord
with the model’s predictions pertaining to a later instant.” (Rosen 1985, p. 341).
The organizational description of the designer’s action allows us to see that the
insights that are the results of previous knowledge and reflection in action are the
engine of the anticipatory nature of Design. If Anticipation is a way to envision
actions that can only be verified in a deferred time, Design is the way in which such
simulations can be provided offering through its practice a virtual setting to exper-
iment safely the possibilities of several futures.
Design and Anticipation as Vision Providers
If Anticipation and Design are ways of knowing and approaching possible futures,
how might this knowledge be activated? How may foresight and projection as
actions be useful to society? Already in the 1950s, Fred Polak recognized the role
of future for society and through the title of his work, The Image of the Future (Polak
1973), he was underling that the capability to imagine several futures and the
capacity to project their image are the key to all choice-oriented behavior. According
to his view, the greatest task of human knowledge was to bridge this gap and to find
those patterns in the past that can be projected into the future as realistic images (van
der Helm 2005).
In the same way in Reconceptualising Futures: A Need and a Hope, Eleonora
Masini (1982), through her concept of previsione sociale, was trying to question how
could we move from abstractly looking into the future to actually building the future.
She proposed a Future conception not only as an image or an idea but as a project
and considered visions as the first step toward what is possible write now, in the
present, in terms of human resources and the will to change. Masini’s critical
discourse, with a surprising sensitivity to design sensibility, leads back to the
relationship between design, revolution, and utopia by asking for a more active,
independent, and responsible designer:
Visions spring from the capacity to recognize the seeds of change that lie in the past and the
present; moreover, visions make it possible to create a future that is different from the present
although its seeds are in the present. (Masini 1982, p. 2).
The capacity to catch weak signals, gather and reinterpret them, and shaping new
products, services, or processes belongs to different levels of the contemporary
design praxis as epitomized by Jonas (2017). It is also attributable to some specific
design tools useful for both encoding and materialization of futures, as for example
the trends’ grasping and scenarios practices.
Design and Anticipation as Agents of Change
Both Design Research and Future Studies are concerned with key concerns that are
central to some of the main concepts arising in the fledgling transdisciplinary domain
of Anticipation. These include, among others, aspiration, accessibility, prospection,
preference, and empathy. Such abstract nouns mask the processes and action-cen-
tered genesis and enactment of change. At the heart of DR and FS is a wish and a
need to change current states, conditions, engagement, and effects into alternate,
preferred, or proposed ones that will enable us to enact change. Here we position DR
and FS in a clearly sociotechnical and cultural-communicative frame, not one
located in predictive, positivistic, or deliberately linear progression. Indeed, there
is a great need for design- and science and technology-based inquiry to be furthered.
However, design had moved far from narrow functionalism and a focus on physical
products to seeing material, tools, and technologies as situated in contexts of social

and cultural use, exchange, and transformation.
In a futures view, we cannot work wholly predictively, so that Herbert Simon’s
earlier definition of design, soon 50 years old, as working to develop “courses of
action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 1969, x)
reminds us that we need to look into what and why and how futures may be cast as
preferences. These preferences refer to how we engage in designerly ways with
material and immaterial artefacts and design processes that center on ill-defined,
fuzzy, messy, and “wicked” problematic centering on designs relations to systems,
complexity, dynamics, emergence, interactions, services and cultural expressions,
and imaginaries. To do so is to engage actively in devising ways to work with change
and the creative coconstruction of participative processes that are no longer delin-
eated wholly from above but are increasingly negotiated through elaborate processes
of shaping futures constructive, collaboratively yet still with critical and adaptive
logics that require iterative, nonlinear revision, and trialing contexts of use and value
creation.
Design deploys prospective techniques such as sketching and prototyping to carry
concepts and potential and possible directions further into development and distri-
bution, thus making visible products, services, and interactions that are embedded in
designerly processes of abductive reframing. These materializations for people and
organizations, together and in relation to one another, themselves become implicated
in passages and procedures of codification and cultural communication, whether in
business or popular expression. FS may be enriched by deeper engagement with how
design inquiry posits, explores, builds, and revises its future-oriented offerings and
substantive always mediated experiences in which we make meaning and sense of
them in and through use and critique. There is a considerable room for a more
elaborated notion of relations between design and innovation that competitive
advantage-framed ones that populate business schools and even much of design
management discourse, needed instead, is understanding of how innovation itself
works through design processes and dynamics in a knowledge-building framework
that respects and unpacks the intricacies of creative coconstruction.
As long ago as 1995, Krippendorf argued that the future of design inquiry was
much about discourse as it is about artifact, materials, and the sociocultural role of
technology. This attention to discourse in our view itself needs careful deconstruc-
tion when we look at relations between design and anticipation. We suggest that
turning to research in Advanced Design (Celi 2015) is one way of exploring these
relations productively and prospectively. This we take up in the next section also
includes a focus on the role of narrative in the field of Design futures, connecting
new narrative, design fiction, and futures research (Morrison 2018). In essence, this
is to take up Margolin’s earlier (2007) notion of “competent conjecture” that placed
design as needing to work toward responsible futures. In our view, working specu-
latively today is a key aspect of Design that although only part of its adversity in
research is one fruitful area for collaboration and cooperation with FS. As Margolin
(2007, p. 14) argued, designers need to urgently draw forth notions of the future into
the present. Here we align with the conceptualization of the future as a cultural
domain and a culturally framed set of intersecting activities such as argued by Arun
Appadurai (2019) that entails aspiration and anticipation. He continues to elaborate
(Appadurai 2015), the “future as a cultural fact” is embedded in communicative
constructs and practices, ones he addresses in terms of media, materiality, and
normativity. We follow this thinking and we extend it into discussion of Speculative
Design and design fiction. Our design-located approach is framed through what we
call Advance Design (ADD).
Advance Design: A Framework for Connecting Design and FS
Potential Futures
When encompassing the future perspectives in design activity, we are confronted

with two main issues: which future are we considering? And how we can deal
with future intended as a reality jet to come? Despite the fact that several Future
studies’ authors discussed about the different kinds of potential futures we
deal with, we find important in this context to choose an interpretative model
which helps in joining FS and Design disciplines: the cone scheme of Trevor
Hancock and Clement Bezold (1993) is very useful for the scope. According to
Stuart Candy – a rare case of a contemporary researcher who pedagogically joins
Futurology and Design education – the Cone model expresses the idea “that, at any
given moment in time, multiple paths are available (though certainly more at some
times than at others), and that, by whatever combination of accident and design, we
make our way ‘forward’ through thickets of possible worlds, carving a particular
path, which by definition is only one of many possible paths.” (Candy 2010, p. 33).
The FS literature is full of different interpretations of the Cone Model, but the one
expressed by Joseph Voros (2003) (Fig. 1) underlines how preferable futures –
concerned with what we “want to” happen – are connected with a more emotional
and subjective perspective and enable a “visioning” and constructive view.
Voros, starting from the essential premise that we always must consider an infinite
variety of potential alternative futures, trays to distinguish the different meanings of
futures clarifying also their use:
• Potential futures – the wider set – that include all of the futures which lie ahead,
including those beyond our imagination, including the ones that are actually
impossible to project, and that are going to subvert contemporary vision of the
reality
• Possible futures – the first cone – that include all the kinds of futures which
“might happen,” the one we could possibly imagine which are often relying on
the existence of some future knowledge that can be glimpsed or that we imagine
as an overcame of current knowledge
• Plausible futures – the second cone – stemming from our actual understanding
and based on current knowledge, encompass those futures which “could happen”
Fig. 1 The cone scheme adapted by Joseph Voros (2003)
• Probable futures – the thinner central cone – are the ones which are likely to
happen like in linear extension of the present from the past; this cone is much
smaller and exemplifies how considering only this perspective is much more
restrictive compared to the other ones
• Preferable futures – which are represented significantly in a cone oriented differ-
ently compared to the central axis – are by contrast, concerned with what we
“want to” happened and thus are more concerned with a subjective or cultural
perspective and value judgment
The cone model has the power to tell us that we must accept and manage the idea
of the existence of a multitude of futures without which all potentialities will
disappear, reducing our perspective to a flat single line, pointing to a predetermined
but unknown future. When thinking about futures, we must prevent the cone from
collapsing and try to escape what Clarke (1958/1984, p. 27) has called “failures of
imagination.” At the same time, we are aware of the risks of a too imaginative and
subjective single projection; thus Design needs to work with multiple, intersecting,
and preferable yet not predictive futures that allow us to aspire to, approximate,
empathize and anticipate change, and to make it accessible through the materializa-
tion of processes, pathways, artifacts, and conjectures.
As one of the world eminent futurist and founders of the Club of Rome, Eleonora
Masini (1982) argued, we need to reconceptualize futures. Even if considering the
“prognosis” approach – focalized on probable futures fruit of the extrapolation of
social indicators and what we actually call big data – and even if inspired from a
“vision” approach oriented to desirable societies, we should embrace a third model
(a combination of the previous ones) where people think about the futures in terms of
projects. This third approach is based on a changing attitude, a forerunner of the so-
called transformation design (Burns et al. 2006), and is very close to everyday
wicked design problems where the project is in continuous precarious tension
between opportunity and constraints. The only difference is represented by time
length. Other works on Transition Design (Irwin 2015) seek to provide an open-
source concept for developing and maintaining “design-led societal transition to
more sustainable futures” (http://transitiondesign.net). It is the interconnectedness of

systems – natural, economic, and social – that Transition design addresses as a
means to reimagining the present and our legacies, or infrastructures, and lifestyles
within which design is so thoroughly implicated and might forge diversity and
difference, locally and globally.
Advance Design: The Project Driven/Led by Possibilities
As well described by Celaschi and others (2011, Advance Design is a field of

industrial design that manages and uses the tools, practices, and knowledge of
conventional industrial design in long-term projects addressing a distant future
(Celi 2015). This location we see as an interesting development from the origins
of twentieth century design as a profession and research domain linked to industri-
alization that is now part of postindustrial economy. This concerns which services
and interactions, products and systems are interconnected and entwined in new and
often emergent ways. Advance Design thus extends beyond product design to
anticipate the complex relations and assemblages of today’s design inquiry and
professional practice and their fluid and dialogical coexistence and coconstruction.
Advance Design, despite the scarce literature (Borja de Mozota 2006; Celi 2010,
2015), is a consolidated practice in product design. Born in the car sector and then
extended to other product systems’ areas, it is undoubtedly linked to the future
dimension of design but also to the methods with which it innovates. Considering
that the initial phases of the process of innovation are acknowledged as crucial at this
point in history, and that the themes regarding the Front End of Innovation are
becoming increasingly important, clearly Design may became a framework to
understand all the future-driven/oriented design praxis. Creating Advance Design
means radically innovating but also innovating through uncut paths, through the
involvement of users or imagining plausible and unexpected scenarios.
Advance Design does not only operate inside the material and concrete market of
products but, on the contrary, works very well for immaterial, soft, and intangible
goods that go from social design and services (Armstrong et al. 2014) to cultural
heritage that may not all be directly accessible. Representing the design world as a
tension between opportunity and constraints, Advance Design is the activity able to
join through projects the world of possibility with actual reality thanks to different
form of exploration. The more we move from constraints to opportunity, the more we
consider the explorative action of design, the more we are moving toward an
advance design framework in which the design subject is less defined. In fact, if
we have to place Advance Design in a matrix which relates know how to know what,
Advance Design definitely practices the area in which previous knowledge is not so
readily available or in which it has been purposely bypassed.
The capacity to understand context constraints, strong and polymorphous
reframing capabilities, and mediation skills are the knowledge areas that ADD can
offer to anticipation. As in Masini’s third model (1982) we need both: a knowledge
of ‘possibles’ and ‘probables’ and a vision of ‘desirables.’ The perspective view of
Advance Design is based on the belief that ‘something can be changed.’ This way of
interpreting future is the natural environment in which designers produce concept
ideas and transform them into innovation. It seems that ADD reframing proposal,
may provide a field for testing and assessing futures theories through the concrete-
ness of design. Moreover, the multidisciplinary and multicultural approach suggests
directing and managing interactions between forms of knowledge and experiences,
helping assess the results and bringing them into constant and conscious interaction
with the particular context.
The alliance between ADD and anticipation can mix different types of knowledge
in respect to the ethical objective embedded in the future. The capability to orient
behaviors through values acts as an accelerator of change only if the project pre-
serves in humanistic nature, in being a plan carried out by people and for people.
ADD, Up-Framing, and Reframing Capacity: From Planning to

Anticipating
The evolution of user needs and desires, the markets saturation, and the passage of
the production system to a value constellation have called for a constant updating of
conventional industrial design and for a continuous innovation system that is based
on a formal, directive notion of strategy as planning and prediction. However, this
does not fully reflect the anticipatory processes and character of design-based
inquiry. Strategic and anticipatory perspectives represent different ways of facing
future perspective in design activity. Both of them aspire to a wider aim of design,
not only connected with the solidity of the products world and the connected markets
but with the immaterial side of goods (meaning, ethics, social aims), both of them
have the aim of planning and designing not only for the immediate tomorrow and
nevertheless they adopt a markedly different attitude or stance toward “making
futures.” It is worth unpacking this distinction as it is important that Futures research,
with its strong origins in strategic planning, along with the force of cybernetics in
systems views, appreciates more fully what we see as lacking from a design-centered
making and cocreating semiotic and material resources (including narrative, tech-
nologies, and experimental expression) for possible and even putative, not merely
preferable, futures (Morrison 2016).
The term Strategic design and its culture were born around a strong emphasis on
the “company” as the main subject of the strategic design culture. In the 1990s, the
idea of a Strategic Design took hold: a more holistic approach, the central role
assumed by many designers in the product development process and the growth of a
corporate culture and image were calling for a designer profile with mixed compe-
tences between project, economy, and culture. In particular, there has been a strong
emphasis on a systemic interpretation of the project connected to the so-called
Product Service System (PSSD) dimension: emerges an orientation toward different
kinds of social and market actors, a clear intention to produce innovation, and an
emphasis on a systemic interpretation of sustainable development (Meroni 2008).
Francesco Zurlo in his definition of the term Strategic Design describes the strategic
adjective as a hat that covers more approaches (operations, tools, and knowledge-
building models) and is involved in theoretical and practical aspects (design leader-
ship, design thinking, design direction, business design, research, etc.). In a wider
sense, when design is involved in the decision-making process, its role becomes
strategic. Strategic Design is the activity able to plan or design to impact favorably
the key factors on which the desired outcome of an organization depends. Another
definition of strategy refers to methods or plans to bring about a desired future, such
as achievement of a goal or solution to a problem. This openness toward future is
connected to the design ability to foster change inside organization but, due to the
origin of such practice – as we have seen – and to the context primarily limited to
enterprise (commercial or social), this change is normally connected to a pre-
determined objective. An horizon toward which the designer look designing scenar-
ios, producing visions and then prototypes and artifacts, able to catalyze and exploit
the present resources to produce a certain range of results.
If we consider the literature coming from the Future Studies area and the
contribution of Voros (2003) in particular, it is soon clear that this perspective
encompasses only a limited vision of the futures. To foster a process toward what
we “want to” happen means to consider only the perspective of the preferable
futures. In other words, futures that is more emotional than cognitive, futures that
derives from value judgments, and for this reason are more subjective depending on
who is doing the preferring. Here the work of Kenneth Gergen (1999) is pertinent.
He asserts the significance of inquiry located in the human sciences (humanities and
social sciences) that adopt an orientation toward future forming. This prospective
frame allows us to engage in what could be not only what scientist inquiry asserts in
studying the world as it is and its related declarative knowledge formations. Design
inquiry does not jettison science; it embodies an epistemology that is projective not
ostensive.
Paradoxically, and to push a point to its extensive and embodied creative extreme,
the only time in which we can act as designers and design researchers then is the
future; Design is an activity heavily projected in to the future. Even if the conscious-
ness of the centrality of the futures study within our discipline is slow to grow, the
actual strength of the international scientific debate about the study of the future –
and Anticipation Studies in particular – allows us to meet this important area of
concern together with other human and social science (sociology, psychology,
anthropology, technology, economy, art) involved in the dimension of time yet to
come. The future awareness or better what Miller (2007) calls “future literacy,” is
crucial in the design profession for many reasons: its huge responsibility in shaping
goods, its ability in planning products longevity or life cycle, its contribution to
service design and social design, but most of all for its unique capacity of imagining,
shaping, and communicating new values and perspective. This is part of cultural
articulation and negotiation between producers and consumers, such as in digital
advertising and social engagement in mediational literacy practices (Morrison and
Skjulstad 2012) and increasingly as can be seen in the field of digital and locative
media in relation to contexts of participation. As Appadurai (2015) has recently
begun to argue, our futures literacies may be understood as being located within
reflexive, critical views on relations between tolls and mediations in cultural frames,
an approach we have ourselves already developed, for example, in design-based
research on locative media, communication design, and the city (Morrison and
Mainsah 2011) that is premised on designing for cultural expression not infrastruc-
tural planning of “the smart city” and it dominant market-driven logics.
Advanced Design (ADD) approach – characterized by the need to think about
products, systems, and services suitable for a distant future – is in our view a
consolidating practice. Through it, designer-researchers are able to suggest innova-
tion directions starting from the earliest phase of the process. According to Celaschi
et al. (2011, p. 8), Design may be understood as engaging in processes of “up-
framing.” Referring to the earlier work of Norman and Ramirez (1993), this refers to
how, in the case of innovation, current value systems may not be simply optimized
by envisioned alternatively. This is key to a design-centered view on anticipation and
futures-oriented construction and critique. For Celaschi et al. (2012, p. 8):
Up-framing activities would require an effort to understand all of the actors involved and
their value; it would also require some thought about how to create value in such a context
and how to become a facilitator and improve the dialogue among all the players. It would
require a vision oriented toward the future.
It is this future orientation that is central to Advanced Design. Included here are
visionary aspects that are part of a projected narrative that is geared to possibilities
and potentialities that involve a mix and diversity of actors and stakeholders. In
terms of Design Futures, as opposed to only new product development or the
generative character and immateriality of interaction and service design, this
approach acknowledges that a variety of practices are involved in shaping prospec-
tive directions. This diversity of practices, and their intersections and variations,
need to be approached with open frames for moving into working toward and within
a future orientation, that is both a world view and methodologically.
Forward with Speculative Design!
Speculation and Design Futures
In keeping with the arguments above, one emergent, and indeed debated, domain of
design inquiry that is largely absent in FS is that of Speculative Design (Dunne and
Raby 2013). This is an approach that attends to the not yet built or currently
realizable; it reaches imaginatively for what is beyond immediately perceived
grasp; it is based in a putative and conjectural mode of inquiry, working conceptually
and discursively. From a Design view, researching the future requires that we need to
remain open to occurrences, to the unknown, and to the unpredictable as they emerge
in processes of change and negotiation (Morrison 2010; Morrison et al. 2010). This
is in sharp contrast to the more confirmatory status of science and empiricism;
design-based inquiry works through designing, by way of materials and tools
investigations, and through cultural articulation of products, interactions, and ser-

vices, located in systems views that are not cybernetically located but are socio-
technical practices that reach toward empathizing with user needs but situate them in
contexts of cultural expression, consumption, exchange, and critique. In short,
a design-based approach to anticipation is what is needed to understand more fully
Appadurai’s assertion that the future is a cultural fact (Appadurai 2013).
This view allows us to connect well with the growth in the past decade especially
on what is known as Critical Design (Dunne and Raby 2001; Dunne 2006) and more
recently Speculative Design (Dunne and Raby 2013) and Adversarial Design
(DiSalvo 2012) that takes up design techniques and modes of work to challenge
political orthodoxies. Critical Design (Dunne and Raby 2001) first sought to high-
light the creatively imagined, and conceptual in design, drawing on art and technol-
ogy to pose alternatives to given artifacts and knowledge. More recently, its founders
have extended this to Speculative Design in which artifacts and their potential future
locations and appropriacy is tentative, exploratory, and putative, reaching forward
into querying the known and posing less than factive alternatives, often placed in the
context of the gallery and within the bounded domains of design communities and
research arenas. The means and manner of crafting such speculative moves (e.g.,
Augur 2013) within an earlier materiality of the physical artifact, or commercial
product, have led to a series of publications that have addressed matters of relations
and associations in the role of pastiche, wit, and sensibility in speculative design
(e.g., Malpass 2013). Thinking adversarially yet anticipatively has been part of
design and speculative work in a different take by Lorraine Gamman et al. (2012)
in developing scenarios for “thinking like a thief,” pointing to the ways in which
Design conjoins scenarios, personas, and strategies narratively and culturally in
contexts of motivated anticipation and enactment.
The role of the speculative in qualitative inquiry has been addressed from the
view of the social sciences and the need to account for engaging with and studying
innovative methods as knowledge framing and brokering (e.g., Parisi 2012). How-
ever, this work largely bypasses specific Design-based experience and inquiry and
even more so that entailed in prospective and projective undertakings that are located
within Design. As a complement, however, attention is growing to the domain of
“design futures” that typically looks into how existing approaches to Design may be
extended to encompass and anticipate societal needs and challenges that lie ahead,
whether in the near or distant future, within views on innovation, social participation,
and wider issues such as sustainability and climate change. The title of the book
Design as Future Making, edited by Susan Yelavich and Barbara Adams (2014),
points to the focus on practice-based inquiry, the importance of enacting design
processes, and social-material artifact production that are what design brings to
“future proofing.” This is not about finding immediate solutions in a functionalist
and directive view on knowledge building but a stance that demands active con-
struction of possible, potential, and putative futures via design.
A View on Futures and Narrative
Engaging productively through Design with the tangled unrealized and contingent
that is the future demands that other domains that engage with anticipatory ontol-
ogies and epistemologies inform Design research. Future Studies helps us place
design work in contexts of planning, scenario development, and policy. However,
Design forces us to move into the making of the future, and here narrative is on the
key domain that is not always strongly articulated within either FS or Design.
Narrative is one of our oldest and most widely practiced and shared cultural
resources and techniques for engaging in sense making and communicating and
perceiving future scenarios, interpersonal relations. It also allows us to conceptualize
pathways and processes for addressing the not-yet-built, situationally and dramatur-
gically, not only in terms of planning and strategy.
Jarratt and Mahaffie (2009) evoke Lakoff’s “Frames” (2008) to explain how brief
sketches and short stories represent the unit of information through which we codify,
comprehend, and learn. Stories are the main tool through which frame, or better
reframe, realities, and engage people, clients, and stakeholders in active change.
They argue we do not need better rational arguments about the benefits of thinking
about the future but we need better stories: “Futurists must rethink scenarios as a
process and a tool, and discover ways to use them much more effectively as powerful
stories that can motivate reshaping the future.” (Jarratt and Mahaffie 2009, p. 5). It is
this narrative element that we take up below as one of the intersections between
Design and Anticipation.
It is developments in Design concerning speculation as a mode of qualitative
inquiry (e.g., Parisi 2012) that allows closer linkages to be shaped between its related
domain of design fiction and the rather more solution-centered application of
narrative to probable and potential real-world scenarios in FS. Already research
exists in the construction of fictional and shared spaces as contributions to practices
of participatory design (Dindler and Sjerlversen 2007; Dindler 2010). FS may
benefit form investigating such design and narrative enactments, as well as their
fictive framing in terms of experimentation (Knutz et al. 2013).
There remains then a space for Anticipation Studies to bridge these approaches
and investigate how narrative might be taken up nonmimetically with respect to
narrative theory and performance (e.g., Alber et al. 2013) to develop further
approaches to foresight and the possible and the probable but also the potential
and the putative (Morrison 2018), in physical and digital dimensions (Dourish and
Bell 2011; Morrison 2010). Following on from the work of Milojevic and
Inayatullaha (2015) on links between narrative studies and foresight research, this
we see as a matter of developing what we call design narrative foresight. We use the
prefix design to distinguish it from already existing and successful approaches to
narrative foresight (e.g., http://actionforesight.net; https://engagedforesight.com)
that tend to work toward effectiveness and business social innovation and strategy
solutions and less the speculative, culturally framed, and emergent expressive and
poetic aspects of a wider design view on communication design futures. Naturally,
historical and retrospective views are crucial in developing understanding of the
future as Fredrick Jameson (2005) argues in his book Archaeologies of the Future.
What is also needed is to experiment with means and modes of conveying the
conjectural and the work that may do to transductively help us anticipate
unpredictable but anticipative futures in creative, designerly ways. Design fiction
provides one such domain.
Design Fiction
Design Fiction (Sterling 2009a, Sterling 2009b; Bleecker 2010; Hales 2013; Lindley
and Coutlon 2015), often thought as the “cousin of science fiction” (Bleeker 2009,
p.8), represents a link between science fact and science fiction and provides the
opportunity to speculate within the fictional reality of the film, considering the
results of this work as more than a props maker or effects artist creating appearances.
Increasingly Design Fictions are moving beyond the medium of film, video, and
photography toward the materialization of, for example, physical props, models, and
prototypes but most of all toward the social value of futures narration (Markussen
and Knutz 2013).
In the recent transdisciplinary research project called Future North that investi-
gates changing cultural landscapes of the Arctic, Morrison (2018) argues for
the positioning and practice of design fictive articulations that engage readers in
narrative moves that take them into different temporal and spatial relations in order
to traverse the complex terrains and depths of climate change. Drawing in the
work of Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) as well as that of Harraway, this is conveyed
through the ventriloquism of self-aware techno-mammalian fictive hybrid in the
form of a nuclear powered female narwhal called Narratta (http://www.oculs.no/
people/narratta/). This is a mode of research through fictive design: a team of
transdisciplinary researchers deploy this persona to investigate, traverse, and com-
municate their own research processes and reflexive methods in and over time,
historically, contemporaneously, and “fugitively” so in the future. The work draws
on contemporary theory on “extreme narration” (e.g., Richardson 2006) while
discursively enacting collaborative communication design logics. This design fic-
tional experiment is part of other mixed research methods taking up in the Future
North project for engaging in future cultural conceptions of the Arctic in the Age of
the Anthropocene.
Design fiction in this case is connected to a mesh of methods, mixed in relation to
the speculative, tentative yet also factively informed foundations of the inquiry.
Based on earlier similar design fiction experiments and related research on critical
views on near future technologies and the city, personas, scripts, scenarios, and
events in rethinking design futures narratively and mediationally (Morrison et al.
2013; Morrison 2014), recent work extends to the involvement of master’s students
in urbanism and landscape studies co-developing a related design fiction
Longyearbyen 2050 centered on the future scenarios of urban life and food security
and climate change (Morrison 2016). At the heart of such work is the notion and
shared practice in finding ways to think about enacting together Advance Design and
Speculative Design practices for sharing futures (Celi and Formia 2015; Celi and
Formia 2017).
Design fiction, and more narrative and fictive approaches to the uses and
reshaping of foresight within FS, is ripe for development. Recent publications in
FS have opened out to conceptualizing narratology in the shaping of futures (e.g.,
Raven and Elahi 2015) as well as working with modality and narrative in the uptake
of scenarios and counterfactuals (Booth et al. 2009). Interest is also growing in
seeing design fiction and narrative in design generative inquiry more broadly, such
as in work on design, anticipation, and ethnography (Lindley and Dhruv 2014), how
narrative and literary techniques may be applied to enhance scientific agenda setting
(Blythe 2014), and connections may be made between ecocriticism and narrative
theory (Lehtimäki 2013; Morton 2013).
Conclusion
In the future shaping of Anticipation, we see there being several links that may be
made between FS and Design as we have elaborated above. Our argument is that
Anticipation may benefit from more fully acknowledging imaginative, creative, and
constructionist aspects of Design. This was clearly evident at the first international
conference on Anticipation in 2016 with a slew of design contributions. That event
and the dialogues around design has propelled many of the “foundational” publica-
tions included here that seek to map, tease out, and propose what Anticipation
Science and Anticipation Studies is and may become. In our transdisciplinary
research and professional design, futures and prospectively based design inquiry
offer new avenues for stronger collaboration when less determinist notions of design
and solution driven are entertained and where the now large body of work in Design
is accessed and may be interlinked with that in FS. Design inquiry could make more
use of research in FS; FS might more fully access research in Design.
Our reading is that FS need not to be seen only in terms of forward planning and
policy convergent moves in shaping knowledge for possible, realizable, and sus-
tainable futures. We firmly acknowledge that these are important pursuits. However,
we also see open and rich opportunities for clearer and stronger connections to be
made between the futures orientations of both Design and FS. This chapter has
shown – through both theory and practice – that Design based inquiry offers FS
elements of working with shaping futures that are located in a now established
traditional of critical making with interpretative reflection located in the human
sciences, and crucially through abduction, cocreation, and speculation. We have
shown how this has been achieved in the recent and emergent field of Advance
Design together with Speculative Design.
We see room for further communicative collaboration in “narrative futures” with
FS in and as ‘wordl making’ (Coulton and Lindley 2017). In our view, the field of
Anticipation is not a discipline as such but that it is a field of multiple mediations and
meanings. In this sense, it extends beyond FS as inherited and expanded in the past
two decades. Anticipation is a multidisciplinary pursuit that is realized through
attention to the cultural and the communicative, the creative, and the critical, not
only via science and not only in the human sciences. This is not a time to argue about
boundaries but rather to explore their relations and refractions, and to shape a space
for engaged participation and exchange. Design offers much to that space, but it does
no seek to possess it.
We argue then that Anticipation maybe shaped as a future pursuit, informed
through Design and supported by way of linkages with Futures Studies that are
equally polymorphous and conjectural alongside other much needed procedural,
factive, and necessary foundations upon which to aspire, approximate, propel, and
together project designs fictions and future-oriented inquiries.
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Anticipation and Design Inquiry

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Anticipation and Design Inquiry

Manuela Celi and Andrew Morrison

# Springer International Publishing AG 2017 1

Design and Anticipation as Agents of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

It is the shift to conceptualizing futures thinking, making, and critical analysis in

We see Anticipation as a transdisciplinary construct comprised of and composed

It is this activity of artifacting – whether it be a physical product, an intangible

Anticipation and Design: Toward a Research-Based View

Beyond the conceptualization or misrepresentation of Design as a pragmatic activity

1. Research on design often accomplished by specialists from other disciplines as

4. Research through design, which generates knowledge by/while adopting a design

The expression “Research through design,” ﬁrst coined by Christopher Frayling

Design, Anticipation, and Knowing

Research through design means research projects that generate knowledge by

The idea highlights the importance of design as an epistemological stance stating

When the practitioner reﬂects-in-action in a case he [she] perceives as unique, paying

Rosen writes, “An anticipatory system is a system containing a predictive model

Design and Anticipation as Vision Providers

Design and Anticipation as Agents of Change

products to seeing material, tools, and technologies as situated in contexts of social

Advance Design: A Framework for Connecting Design and FS

When encompassing the future perspectives in design activity, we are confronted

Fig. 1 The cone scheme adapted by Joseph Voros (2003)

more sustainable futures” (http://transitiondesign.net). It is the interconnectedness of

Advance Design: The Project Driven/Led by Possibilities

As well described by Celaschi and others (2011, Advance Design is a ﬁeld of

ADD, Up-Framing, and Reframing Capacity: From Planning to

Forward with Speculative Design!

Speculation and Design Futures

investigations, and through cultural articulation of products, interactions, and ser-

A View on Futures and Narrative

Krippendorf, K. (1995). The semantic turn. London: Taylor & Francis.

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