Enabling urban futures making through early-stage and punctuated design prototyping: the case of T-Factor local innovation hubs

Futures thinking is a crucial skill for organisations navigating volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments. Nonetheless, some researchers and practitioners argue that the insights futures thinking can yield appear obvious, trivial, or overly abstract and stress the need to move towards futures making. This paper examines how early-stage and punctuated prototyping can enhance futures making within urban transformation processes, supporting the co-creation, experimentation and decision-making on futures from local stakeholders. Drawing from the case study of T-Factor, a four-year project aiming to envision and prototype future uses in urban spaces, we find that two essential dimensions of prototyping—filtering and manifesting—can aid stakeholders in thinking about futures throughout the design process and, eventually, enable futures making. The content analysis of our data shows how these two dimensions contribute to futures making by facilitating the materialisation of more concrete, actionable, and engaging representations of the future that can be experienced, performed, assessed, and refined. The paper concludes by proposing practical recommendations for organisations and communities aiming to envision and realise sustainable urban futures through prototyping.