Artifact - Volume 8, Issue 1-2, 2021

In light of current environmental challenges, it often seems that optimism is a required emotional state for addressing our future. This can be seen in how different technological fixes are assumed to sort our futures out at the same time as requiring minimal change in our daily lives. Moving beyond our existing high-carbon and material lives requires not only that we deal with the optimistic end of the spectrum but also that we envision fragile and uncertain futures. In response, this article proposes a designerly format for supporting public anticipation that attends to and cares for tensions between hope and grief, with the aim of nurturing grounds for living with uncertain futures. In contrast to abstract and decontextualized visions and images of the future that can be hard to relate to, the format situates anticipation in lived futures, that are ongoing, emerging and situated in specific locations, environments and experiences. By tending to anticipated losses related to the transition to a post-carbon future, the workshop format created space for confronting shared difficulties and vulnerabilities. Despite the lack of easy solution, the format also opened up for articulating alternatives and less tech-oriented hopeful engagements and practices.

In this article, we discuss and argue for the value of working with strategic design in organizational settings through inventive research practices rooted in co-design and design anthropology. More specifically, we propose a process of collaborative experimentation staged as a series of events that establish relations between everyday organizational perspectives and practices and organizational strategic documents. We base our analytical discussions and reflections on a research project carried out in the organizational setting of a labour union. We describe how a programme–experiment informed design research approach, driven by and reliant on collaborative explorations, provides a scaffold for unlocking organizational strategic management visions and goals in interaction with transformational perspectives on organizational practices. We frame our approach as a research strategy of working ‘from within’ the organizational setting, which focuses on staging dialogues between the experimental and the managerial. Such a disposition, we argue, offers important alternatives to management literatures’ current approaches to strategic design research.