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New Course: Designing Sustainable Futures
GENERAL OVERVIEW
Designing Sustainable Futures is an eight-week intensive program to develop the skills and mindset of practitioners who are passionate building a better world. Regardless of whether you have a design or management background, want to create a for-profit or non-profit, Designing Sustainable Futures course will enable you to strengthen your resilience for making an impact.
Starting with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals with specific industry focus (SDGs 3, 9, 12, and 16) and a community focus (SDGs 3, 4, 5, 8, and 16), participants will explore and practice the essential skills of strategic foresight, world building, and transformation, specifically:
ORIENTATION | Welcoming and Onboarding
Friday, October 7, 2022
8am-9am EDT / 14:00-15:00 CEST / Check your local time here
CLASS 1 | Designing Sustainable Futures: Introduction to Design Futures
Friday, October 21, 2022
8am-12pm EDT / 14:00-18:00 CEST / Check your local time here
CLASS 2 | Maintaining a Design Approach: Introduction to Speculative Design
Friday, October 28, 2022
8am-12pm EDT / 14:00-18:00 CEST / Check your local time here
CLASS 3 | Building Better Worlds: Introduction to World Building
Friday, November 4, 2022
8am-12pm EDT / 13:00-17:00 CET / Check your local time here
CLASS 4 | Designing Systems: Introduction to Systemic Design
Friday, November 11, 2022
8am-12pm EST / 14:00-18:00 CET / Check your local time here
CLASS 5 | Prototyping Artifacts from the Future: Introduction to Design Fiction
Friday, November 18, 2022
8am-12pm EST / 14:00-18:00 CET / Check your local time here
CLASS 6 | Cultivating Movements: Introduction to Participatory Design
Monday, November 28, 2022
8am-12pm EST / 14:00-18:00 CET / Check your local time here
CLASS 7 | Engaging Stakeholders: Introduction to Storymaking
Monday, December 5, 2022
8am-12pm EST / 14:00-18:00 CET / Check your local time here
CLASS 8 | Thinking Full-Spectrum: Introduction to Futures Leadership
Monday, December 12, 2022
8am-12pm EST / 14:00-18:00 CET / Check your local time here
In exploring SDGs, participants will learn the tools and methodology to understand where megatrends—like social changes, economics, diversity, climate change—are going, and develop their adaptability for any future. By seeking more sustainable futures, participants will expand their capacity for full-spectrum thinking by learning about the latest insights from neuroscience and complex systems, relating insights to their context, and experiment design-driven anticipation practice. Graduates of the course can expect to open opportunities in strategic foresight, innovation acceleration, and digital transformation.
ADDRESSED TO
- Professionals who have strategy, innovation, and/or transformation responsibilities;
- Professionals and students that want to accelerate their transition to preferred futures;
- Graduate students preparing for a career in strategy, innovation, and/or transformation;
- Alumni of the course can expect to open new job opportunities in Strategic foresight, Innovation acceleration, digital transformation and social impact.
PROFESSIONAL OUTCOMES
In today's job market nothing is sure, but there is an increasing career market for someone who completes a program in Design Futures / Fiction. Two job titles dominate these kinds of opportunities, primarily a Strategic Foresight Practitioner, and Futurist. As Foresight becomes more common as a strategic need for companies, more Strategic Foresight teams are set up, usually in the Strategy or Innovation departments.
The course aims to answer this growing need through:
- A deep understanding and activation toward the SDGs through a more critical and forward-looking positioning;
- The development of UNESCO key competencies for sustainability, specifically Anticipatory, Strategic, Systems thinking, Integrated problem-solving, Normative, Critical thinking, and Self-awareness;
- The capacity to recognize the wider system scale of needs and outline several possible path toward preferred futures;
- Develop the most creative anticipatory attitudes through methods and tools typical of design practices.
Graduates of similar programs, are hired into these positions to help companies be able to design and implement services at the forefront of market innovation with sustainability.
Participants will be expected to bring a project they are currently working on that can benefit from applying their learnings from the course.
FACULTY
Scientific Director | Prof. Manuela Celi
Deputy Manager | Prof. Joseph Press
Course Coordinators | POLI.design Paola Galdi
For more information about our collaborators, visit the POLI.design course page »
CONTACT
For questions, please email [email protected].
You may also be interested in:
- IFTF Foresight Essentials training
- IFTF Design Futures training
- IFTF Scenario Building training
- IFTF Futures Thinking on Coursera