Abstract
Teaching design for long-term, societal-level sustainability requires design students to learn new design methods that combine Futures Thinking with Design Thinking. This paper explores three questions: (a) how to teach Futures Thinking methods; (b) when to incorporate Futures Thinking into the undergraduate curriculum; and (c) how many exercises to assign to teach a futures method. In this paper, we focus on the Futures Thinking method called Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). Previous research has shown that a “Studio Project CLA” exercise is three times more effective than a “Personal Futures CLA” in helping students apply CLA to their design work. In this paper, undergraduate students in their first and third years did both exercises. We report on three studies. In Study 1, we replicated prior research using a larger dataset. Our results confirm that when performing a single exercise, the “Studio Project CLA” exercise is significantly more effective than the “Personal Futures CLA” exercise. In Study 2, we compared the performance of first-year and third-year design students on both exercises. We found that first-year students had more design insights on how they might apply CLA to design processes. In study 3, regarding the order and quantity of exercises, contrary to the maxim “more practice is better,” we found that “what one practices matters.” In other words, for first-year students, a single “Studio Project CLA” exercise provides more benefit than an additional “Personal Futures CLA” exercise. We posit that the observed transfer from “Futures Thinking” to “Design Thinking” may be explained by three theories from Learning Science literature: (a) concreteness and abstraction of the CLA exercises, (b) the layered aspects of CLA helped to emphasize structural similarities across contexts, (c) concreteness fading in the Design Studio exercise. This study examined the number of design insights; our future work will explore the types and quality of design insights.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.070
Citation
Scupelli, P.,and Carvalho, P.(2025) Design Futures Pedagogy: Does the type of exercise, year of study, order, and number of exercises matter?, in Clemente, V., Gomes, G., Reis, M., Félix, S., Ala, S., Jones, D. (eds.), Learn X Design 2025, 22-24 September 2025, Aveiro, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.070
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Full Paper
Design Futures Pedagogy: Does the type of exercise, year of study, order, and number of exercises matter?
Teaching design for long-term, societal-level sustainability requires design students to learn new design methods that combine Futures Thinking with Design Thinking. This paper explores three questions: (a) how to teach Futures Thinking methods; (b) when to incorporate Futures Thinking into the undergraduate curriculum; and (c) how many exercises to assign to teach a futures method. In this paper, we focus on the Futures Thinking method called Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). Previous research has shown that a “Studio Project CLA” exercise is three times more effective than a “Personal Futures CLA” in helping students apply CLA to their design work. In this paper, undergraduate students in their first and third years did both exercises. We report on three studies. In Study 1, we replicated prior research using a larger dataset. Our results confirm that when performing a single exercise, the “Studio Project CLA” exercise is significantly more effective than the “Personal Futures CLA” exercise. In Study 2, we compared the performance of first-year and third-year design students on both exercises. We found that first-year students had more design insights on how they might apply CLA to design processes. In study 3, regarding the order and quantity of exercises, contrary to the maxim “more practice is better,” we found that “what one practices matters.” In other words, for first-year students, a single “Studio Project CLA” exercise provides more benefit than an additional “Personal Futures CLA” exercise. We posit that the observed transfer from “Futures Thinking” to “Design Thinking” may be explained by three theories from Learning Science literature: (a) concreteness and abstraction of the CLA exercises, (b) the layered aspects of CLA helped to emphasize structural similarities across contexts, (c) concreteness fading in the Design Studio exercise. This study examined the number of design insights; our future work will explore the types and quality of design insights.