My daughter’s high school has a new entrance sign declaring: ‘Designing Futures’. During open days, schools pledge to educate young people for an unknown future, while the Australian National Technologies Curriculum positions designing for preferred futures as a central aim. This paper undertakes a scoping review of research literature in design and education contexts to explore what lies behind the rhetoric of this statement and, more importantly, how such aspirations are enacted in educational contexts. Designing for preferred futures is not a simple proposition. Framed in this way, it appears profound and laden with promise, yet the concepts of design and futures are often ill‑defined, aspirational, and abstract, rendering them elusive and challenging to teach. Schools frequently invoke the language of futures implicitly, suggesting that they already deliver futures‑focused education; however, publicly available materials often reveal little explicit engagement with how or why such claims are made. The literature indicates that designing for preferred futures requires critical, creative, collaborative, imaginative, and speculative thinking, supported by amplified models of design pedagogy suited to educational contexts. Drawing on this body of work, the paper maps key ideas and approaches emerging across disciplines and identifies practical directions for educators, including the development of a shared design futures vocabulary, strategies for conceptual design thinking in futures contexts, and methods for applying futures‑oriented design in classroom projects. While design educators are far from ambivalent about the implications of design futures rhetoric, the literature suggests that practical and inspiring ways to translate these ambitions into teaching practice remain under‑developed.
Belinda von Mengersen (Wed,) studied this question.