Designing back from the future: building scenarios to engage students with globa
Designing back from the future: building scenarios to engage students with global challenges
Professor Anke Schwittay
How can we move students from critically analysing contemporary challenges – for example urban inequality and unsustainability – to also imagining possible responses to them? In this chapter, which draws on my book Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures (Schwittay, 2021), I show how introducing students to design thinking and methods, including scenario building, is an active learning approach that combines critique and creativity in university classrooms. While design methods can be applied in any course that deals with social, economic or ecological challenges, the activity described here is based on a series of exercises I undertake with students in a third-year specialist module on Urban Futures and is informed by my long-term collaboration with design-educator Paul Braund (Braund & Schwittay, 2006).
I also draw on Anne-Marie Willis’ exercise ‘Designing back from the future,’ where she defines scenarios as projections of likely futures that open them up for reflection, including on the actions necessary to achieve them (Willis, 2014). I use positive and pro-active scenarios that ask students to imagine preferred futures and to pose ‘how might we’ and ‘what if’ questions to make ideas concrete. Willis argues that scenarios need to be set in a specific place and long-enough time horizon and be based on in-depth research to stop them from being fantasies or wishful thinking. Ideally students undertake this research prior to the scenario building activity, but if that is not possible, even giving them basic information and laptop access to conduct on-the-spot research can help provide the necessary realistic context.
The activity works well with student groups of around 5 or 6 members each; if there are more than 5 such groups, several facilitators would ensure that all groups get the necessary attention. This chapter is structured around five suggested steps for how to plan and implement scenario building exercises in class: providing clear structures and inspiring materials, starting with what is familiar to students, asking questions, ensuring that students move from writing to building and debriefing.
1) Provide structure and materials
Even though this might seem counter-intuitive, it is important to give students clear guidelines and structured activity outlines for more open-ended learning activities such as scenario building (Lyon, 2011). From my own experience, students are often not familiar with creative classroom work, can be resistant to it because of ‘I can’t draw’-type reservations, might feel vulnerable outside of their comfort zones or prefer passive knowledge accumulation to exploratory learning (James & Brookfield, 2014). Explaining the objectives of creative classroom activities and how they work, in clear and empathetic ways, puts students at ease and helps to