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The limits of the modern lifestyle have been well established. What comes next? Design lacks a collective vision, or set of aspirational futures, to work towards. Increasing evidence suggests the t...

With growing complex and systemic challenges facing the ocean, there is an urgent need to increase the scale and effectiveness of approaches to marine conservation, including protecting and recognizing the value of all of its services. Stronger multi-sector networks of organizations are needed, sharing knowledge and working in unison to create a common narrative for the ocean and the solutions to its protection. In an innovative experiment, the Marine CoLABoration (CoLAB) brings together nine non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to explore collaboratively how to communicate more effectively. The CoLAB hypothesizes that communicating the full value of the ocean in all its rich diversity connects with people’s deeply held, personal values and leads to more impactful ocean conservation. Through horizon scanning with the wider sector, the CoLAB determines experiment themes to test this hypothesis. These are based predominantly in the United Kingdom and include #OneLess, Agents of Change and We are Ocean. The CoLAB’s work demonstrates that by effectively building and promoting an understanding of the full value of the ocean, it is possible to trigger a wider range of human values to catalyze engagement with marine conservation issues. A joined up, interdisciplinary approach to communicating why the ocean matters, engaging a wide range of actors will be crucial in effecting long term, systemic change for the ocean. The need for greater United Kingdom ocean literacy has also been highlighted across the CoLAB and its experiments and presents an opportunity for further work.

The research starts from the premise that as the world is changing rapidly and in nonlinear ways, we are educating future practitioners for jobs and contexts that don’t yet exist. They instead need to be equipped to work for and with uncertainty to be able to grapple with the scale and pace of emergent change. The fields of design and futures studies bring significant insights to this challenge, including an array of methods, tools, and frameworks for prospective and systemic explorations of alternative futures. The emerging field of design futures can be framed as ways to develop and deploy prompts, artifacts, and narratives to critically interrogate tomorrow’s societal debates today; as such, it is intentional from the outset in its pursuit of preferable futures and therefore social and environmental justice. The process of imagining the future is an active, values-laden social practice, which requires a layered approach to a methodology to surface and challenge dominant patterns—making it an ideal approach for training the young people who will shape our future. This article reports on the design and delivery of participatory workshops that employ design futures methods to facilitate the exploration of transformative change for sustainability. These workshops were conducted with young people aged sixteen to seventeen to equip them to develop and explore alternative futures. The results suggest that design futures methods can facilitate participants from non-design backgrounds to develop alternative futures and artifacts that might sit within them. It was found that developing a sense of ownership was key to enabling participants to effectively reflect on alternative futures and their implications. Finally, the study highlights the potential for these methods to inform both design and sustainability pedagogy.

Urban-led change for sustainability is a key site of intervention in delivering the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals. Within this broad discourse, four umbrella concepts have emerged in recent decades: urban sustainability, urban transitions, urban transformation and urban resilience. This literature review aims to offer a qualitative assessment of the types of interventions currently being advocated for in academic-led literature. Firstly, the paper presents an overview of the concepts and summarises current gaps; secondly, it uses Donella Meadows' Leverage Points as analytical framework to categorise and discuss interventions supported in the literature. Our findings indicate that although the literature advocates for systemic change towards sustainability as an outcome of a large palette of urban interventions, less consideration is given to the means of achieving these. The findings highlight the need to focus on processes as much as on outcomes when advocating, devising or implementing interventions. This requires a process of understanding and negotiating trade-offs and the different worldviews and values that underpin them. Addressing this entails going beyond technocratic skills through cultivating reflexivity, effective communities of practice and new forms of organising for knowledge production, as well as interrogate our roles and agency as urban researchers.

The lack of progress in the face of complex sustainability challenges has in part been attributed to a lack of imagination, rather than awareness. Nurturing and surfacing pluralistic alternative futures, as well imagining the pathways that might get us there, are key processes in bridging this imagination gap. The emerging field of design futures provides methods and tools to develop narratives as well as tangible artefacts depicting products, services and experiences set within alternative futures. These methods build on long-established interdisciplinary inquiries into how and why people develop images of the futures. The present research aims to explore young people’s images of the future (set in 2068 and 2038) through design futures methods. This paper presents the outcomes of a series of workshops in which over 70 young people (aged 16–17) imagined a series of alternative futures and developed artefacts that support the pathways towards these futures. The results reveal that while design futures methods are effective in developing and interrogating collective future imaginaries, deeper challenges rooted in the homogeneity of dominant Western imaginaries and the hyper–individualistic turn of late–modernity remain.