Future scenario planning as a tool for sustainable design education and innovation

![CDATA[Industrial design education has traditionally focused on the development of material product solutions that best serve requirements and criteria set by a client. Design innovation commonly results in shortened product lifecycles, which supports the net escalation of resource consumption and waste. It is proposed that the context of sustainability, fundamentally at odds with this tradition, requires innovation not only in terms of the nature of the design solutions provided, but also in terms of the ability of aspiring designers to critically address, and generate design criteria in response to new problem contexts. Ultimately sustainability challenges the perceived role of design and the ideal 'graduate attributes' of designers. This clearly has implications for how sustainable design is taught. This paper explores future scenario planning as a highly appropriate context for the development of this innovation capability. Scenario planning has recently become an important tool for envisioning sustainable futures (Manzini 2003). Offered to students as an intensive workshop that emulates a collaborative problem-solving design exercise, scenario planning provides a novel forum for the generation of, reflection on and debate about possible design solutions or 'concrete hypotheses' (Manzini 2002) for more sustainable ways of living, working and playing. Outlining the strategic value of a range of foresight concepts, methods, technologies and creativity tools, the paper offers explicit, practical examples of how these tools can be effectively integrated into a future scenario planning workshop. In particular, it is the change agency sought by such tools that shares strong synergies with innovation in design. Finally, the paper analyses the problems and opportunities associated with the promise and ambition of this style of education.]]