Good design is in service of the future.
Futurethingy is a design consultancy and change agency that envisions future states, such as products, transportation, cities, and systems, through visual design and narratives. The future can be tomorrow, or 50 years from now. Futurethingy isn’t sci-fi but grounded futurism, based on years of industrial design, experience design, and interaction design for some of the world’s largest companies. Futurethingy guides you with design on projects large and small, from health and wellbeing and community engagement, to branding, workshops, and large scale future visualisations.
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Insight is where everything begins and where the simplest and most direct solutions are yielded. This is where intuition plays a huge part, before there’s too much information, expertise or prepackaged opinions that can get in the way of true inspiration. It’s where the most raw and uninterrupted ideas come from and this is where stream-of-consciousness sketching plays a big role.
Foresight allows us to step outside that inner world and look a bit further afield. Looking in the wrong place with a microscope won’t get us anywhere, and we need to choose the right tools for the job. A bigger worldview is needed when figuring out where to head next, and foresight allows us to take into account trends, research, analysis and combine them with our intuition to produce valuable results.
Moresight is a launch into the unknown. Taking risks, searching instead of just researching, and asking unexpected questions can lead to all sorts of new discoveries and opportunities. It’s here we have to abandon what’s come before and think outside the sphere.
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The future has lost its appeal. What once evoked hope and optimism now seems to instil fear and cynicism instead. Remember when the future was a place we all wanted to be?
We used to have collective excitement about what was possible in the future. Maybe it’s that 99% of movies set in the future are dystopian, or that we’re so oversaturated by ideas and technology and information and stimulation that we just lump everything together as ‘content’ and call it a day.
Design is an optimistic act, there’s no point in drawing, making, communicating, fixing, or imagining things if you don’t think the future is worth it. Let’s get back to making sure the future is cool, yo.
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You’ll often hear design defined as a ‘problem solving’ exercise. But the things that we perceive as separate, isolated problems are symptoms of larger, underlying patterns. Setting out to ‘solve’ problems without deeply understanding them is akin to painting the leaves on a tree green while the roots rot.
The problem with solutions is that we define them as neat, tidy, and final. Nothing is final. No matter how solid, future proof, indestructible, or permanent a solution is said to be, it’s still in flux; transitioning from one state to the next. There are no final solutions, but rather progressions.
If we define a problem as ‘an inquiry’ and a solution as ‘the action of separating or breaking something down’, then we can look at their relationship as one of creation and destruction. One gives rise to the next. I consider problems to be signals, and solutions responses to those signals. We don’t all see the same signals. But being able to respond to those we do see gives us purpose and an ability to move forward, to what’s next: the future.
Read more on this here.
“We bring the risk of missing unexpected discoveries if we always expect the future to resemble the past.”