In our Best Practices for Maintaining a Meetup Chapter ****the ****Design Futures Initiative invites anyone operating in any field that looks into the future, working with emerging technologies, and working in emerging domains to join our growing global community to develop a perspective on how things could be.
The driving mission of the Design Futures Initiative is to develop a platform to create a better tomorrow, not insulate ourselves within a particular term or topic space. That being said, particular domains and disciplines that have informed or inspired our mission and mindsets include but are not limited to:
Speculative Design
Critical Design
Discursive Design
Futures Studies
Science-Fiction and Speculative Fiction
Strategic Foresight
Design Fiction
Business Strategy
Architecture
the Arts writ large
Similar topic areas worth exploring as you familiarize yourself with the domains comprising Speculative Futures broadly include
Design-Futures
Experiential Futures
Civic Design
Design of Societal Networks
Transdisciplinary Design
Applied Futures Thinking
Strategic Design
Systemic Design
Participatory Design
Near Future Design
Integrative Design
Ecological & Circular Design.
<aside> 💡 The Austin, TX chapter extended their search for practitioners locally to include these terms and discovered local practitioners and organizations they were previously unaware of.
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As you contemplate and form your own opinions about what might contribute to or currently informs Speculative Futures, I recommend reading over this brief inquiry of the Speculative Design ecosystem using social networks by Salvatore Iaconesi, taking a look at the second version of Elliott Montgomery's unresolved mapping of Speculative Design embedded below., and reviewing Rafeal Popper's Foresight Diamond.