Futures Design Lab

The future is not something to predict. It’s something to design.

To shift decisions, futures need to become tangible — something you can see, hold, walk through, and argue about.

Futures Design Lab is where futures are made, not just mapped. We combine strategic foresight, design fiction, systemic design, and anthropological fieldwork to create experiences and prototypes that make possible worlds concrete — so your team can examine them, challenge them, and use them to make better choices today.

What you get

Prototypes from possible worlds

Physical or digital artifacts “from the future” — products, interfaces, documents, environments — that function as material arguments. Not illustrations of a trend report, but working pieces of evidence: objects you can show to your board, test with users, or use to provoke a strategic conversation that abstract slides never could.

Immersive experiences

Simulations, narrative environments, and workshop formats where your team “inhabits” an alternative future. This tangibility changes how people engage: instead of debating generalities, they confront concrete choices, trade-offs, and consequences — and discover assumptions they didn’t know they were making.

Future narratives as strategic infrastructure

We design narratives that work both outward and inward: strengthening external positioning (“what future are we helping to build?”) and internal alignment (shared direction, cultural coherence, decision clarity). These are not marketing stories — they are strategic instruments grounded in values, consequences, and real organisational trade-offs.

Innovation across scales

We work from micro-improvements (service refinements, product concepts, operational prototypes) to transformational interventions (new value logics, partnership ecosystems, institutional redesign). Both at once, because organisations need short-term wins and long-term adaptive capacity simultaneously.

How we work

Three connected rhythms — often combined:

1. Sense-making

Horizon scanning, pattern detection, systemic mapping, identification of “pockets of tomorrow.” We read signals not as isolated data points, but as relational phenomena — connected through infrastructures, narratives, markets, and cultural shifts.

2. Translation

Scenarios, decision architecture, narrative design, strategic options. We convert what we’ve found into frameworks your team can use to decide and act.

3. Prototyping & rehearsal

Design fiction artifacts, service prototypes, immersive simulations, speculative experiences. Futures as something you can try on, critique, and iterate — not just read about.

What sets this apart

This is the most experimental format in our portfolio — and the one that most powerfully shifts how people think. We draw on curatorial, artistic, and anthropological traditions that most consultancies don’t touch. The result is work that engages imagination at a level that slides and spreadsheets cannot reach — while remaining grounded in strategic rigour and decision relevance.

If your challenge requires conventional scenario planning, start with our Strategic Foresight & Scenario Planning Process. Come here when you need a breakthrough — when the problem isn’t lack of data, but lack of imagination.

Formats

• Research-design project (1–4 months): From signals to prototypes to strategic recommendations
• Immersive lab / workshop (1–3 days): Intensive futures-making experience for teams
• Exhibition / installation: Designed futures as public or internal communication
• Prototype studio: Rapid concept development from foresight insights

Who this is for

• An FMCG brand looking for breakthrough product innovation beyond incremental improvement.
• A cultural institution designing its programme and identity for the next decade.
• A city running a participatory process about a neighbourhood’s future.
• An international organisation communicating complex scenarios to diverse audiences.
• An innovation team that has hit the ceiling of conventional thinking and needs a fundamentally different approach.

Start designing your future