From Design Thinking to Futures Thinking (part 1)

While Design Thinking has been the heuristic of choice for the NOVA Lab pioneers since our inception, the scope of the class has changed. As precarity, permacrisis, and other aspects of a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambigous (VUCA) world come to predominate in this “Time Between Worlds” (see Zach Stein), and as many prognosticators struggle to imagine our arrival at the 22nd Century if our current appetites and drives continue, I’ve come to adopt a more systems thinking approach to our work.

It is not a new approach, only new to us: Futures Thinking.

Our first encounter with the concept was probably grossly overlooked, but this summer, laid up by a torn achilles tendon, I happened upon the PBS series A Brief History of the Future with futurist Ari Wallach. Consuming all the episodes in a few days, I rethought the entirety of a marking period and may have, quite literally, designed a future my students had not anticipated.

If you’re not sure your tax dollars are doing anything of value in terms of the Public Broadcasting System, you’re not paying enough attention. First, the series is incredible in its scope. From recognizing the importance of native wisdom and the value of being a good ancestor to climatological impacts of all we do, to how we as communities and individuals can shape the futures we desire, rather than react to the ones we unthinkingly arrive at.

But what makes the rhetoric of the film making even more valuable is the educational materials behind it. The PBS Learning Resources for this show are immense, and the depth to which they allow educators, who may be only briefly familiar with the concept of Futures Thinking, to take their students is incredible. In a mere two weeks, our NOVA Lab students will have done deep background work in thinking like a Futurist, practicing Foresight Thinking, Signal and Trends spotting, Scenario Planning, and Protopian design.

I am filled with the giddy anxiety of a teacher who has jumped into a space I know is valuable, but who is learning along side my students. What I know from my 31 years in the classroom is that there is no other place I would rather be than learning WITH my students.

While I am learning along side my students, I am also, as is my habit, jumping down this rabbit hole of Futures Literacy. I’ve recognized much of what I’ve discovered as a sort of updating of design thinking (the Institute for the Future has called it the “new design thinking). This is a space my classes have occupied for decades, and so jumping into the future, and following people like the Institute for the Future, Zachary Stein (see Education in a Time Between Worlds) Will Richardson and the BIG Questions Institute , The Human Restoration Project, The STARTedUP Foundation, Benjamin Freud and Coconut Thinking, and countless others is second nature to me.

However, bringing our NOVA Lab students to the space, especially with the help of PBS and others, is, perhaps, the greatest work of my life. After all, it is the closest I’ve come to living out with my students the two questions that are the credo of our classroom:

Why are things the way they are?

How can we make them better?

I don’t know if this will help anyone follow us or help lead you, as well, to working towards more regenerative, protopian futures, but I used an AI site called Gamma to take this article, a primer on Futures Thinking from the Institute for the Future, to create a slidedeck on Futures Thinking (see below). Perhaps, along with all the other sources, and the Wakelet I’ve started on the subject, others will follow / lead the way to a better future.

Over the course of the next 10 days, NOVA Lab students will be designing future cities around trends and signals they have identified with the goal of developing protopian futures. They will develop the criteria, but only after research and sifting through the static to find the patterns and trends. Many, I hope, will use AI to expedite this work.

Whatever the outcome of this prototype, I am sure it will drive us forward towards futures far better than those we find in the movies or even our current collaborative dreams. If you are an educator interested in Futures Thinking and how it can help us imagine better futures not only for education but also for all species and humanity, if you believe in Buckminster Fuller’s idea (either from the quotation above or from his brilliant “World Game,” if you have hope instead of complacency in the face of the dystopian futures that populate so many of our texts…. Well, if you “feel” any of that, I’d love to start a group, or be pointed to one that already exists, to share ideas and dream/imagine/invent/wonder about these things. Please reach out to me at gheidt@pvsd.org, or touch base with me on LinkedIn.