Design & Scenarios
The Oxford Futures Forum (OFF)
is a triennial two-day meeting of practitioners and scholars geared towards nurturing new collaborations in research,
practice, and education focused on scenario planning. Since 2005, the OFF has sought to confront scholarship from
different fields with scenario practice to advance scholarly understanding of
why and how scenarios work. In doing so, it fosters the development of new
joint projects, publications, exhibitions, events and other activities. In the 2014 OFF, the authors, as co-conveners
the event, proposed exploring the new theoretical terrain opened up through
focusing on design, a field that is becoming more theorized and also emerges
from practice. In addition to open space dialogue, the curated exhibition, Future Things, enabled greater generative dialogue by providing examples of visual and sensory means for conceptualization and interaction that represent futures in novel ways.
“The Oxford Futures Forum was designed to enable generative dialogue, productive collaboration and deep reflection on the connections between scenario thinking and practice and design – particularly the scholarly study of design,” said Rafael Ramirez, Fellow in Strategy at Saïd Business School and Director of the Oxford Scenarios Programme. “The fact that many designers must first design before they can describe, while scenario planners must first describe before they can design ensured a creative tension that ran throughout the forum. Participants all contributed exciting ideas and intriguing – if sometimes disturbing – images that will resonate with us all for years to come and, I hope, be the start of creating new knowledge in these different yet complementary fields.”
Oxford Futures Forum was co-hosted by Yasser Bhatti, Lucy Kimbell, Rafael Ramirez and Cynthia Selin and brought together by Saïd Business School, Green-Templeton College, the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives from Arizona State University and benefited from scholarships generously funded by the Global Business Policy Council of AT Kearney.
“The Oxford Futures Forum was designed to enable generative dialogue, productive collaboration and deep reflection on the connections between scenario thinking and practice and design – particularly the scholarly study of design,” said Rafael Ramirez, Fellow in Strategy at Saïd Business School and Director of the Oxford Scenarios Programme. “The fact that many designers must first design before they can describe, while scenario planners must first describe before they can design ensured a creative tension that ran throughout the forum. Participants all contributed exciting ideas and intriguing – if sometimes disturbing – images that will resonate with us all for years to come and, I hope, be the start of creating new knowledge in these different yet complementary fields.”
Oxford Futures Forum was co-hosted by Yasser Bhatti, Lucy Kimbell, Rafael Ramirez and Cynthia Selin and brought together by Saïd Business School, Green-Templeton College, the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives from Arizona State University and benefited from scholarships generously funded by the Global Business Policy Council of AT Kearney.
future-oriented scholar and practitioner