ANTICIPATIVE CO-CREATION METHOD

Abstract

We experience an urgent climate crisis that shakes our whole existence and calls for change. The field of industrial design education has expanded over the past decades towards a new language of speculative design projects, aiming to influence industry and address unsustainable manufacturing. How designers typically use their capacities for change, is shown in the discursive qualities of proposed solutions. Within the current educational context, not given a commercial brief, new methods arise. This international design master's course aims to find better future product concepts that nudge sustainable ways of living. How they initiate and prototype these product ideas, is through design fiction and co-creation, conceptualizing and proposing solutions to essential problems and needs. By the use of prototypes, designers can bring essential future solutions into the present. This paper outlines how the new ‘Anticipative Co-creation Method’ emerged. As the foresighted concepts intend to address the negative trends in overconsumption and unsustainable lifestyle, the designs for the far future function as inspirational future versions of the relevant suggestions for today. Through interpersonal anticipatory engagement, concepts grow out of the design fiction. In a dialog with each other students verbalize scenarios and through co-creation concepts become ‘real’ as different videos were created. We have observed that the students build empathy for each other through co-creative activities within the method of anticipation. If we want a thriving future, we need to act now. The design profession has never been more essential in building and critically assessing design futures literacies.