Designing The Future

Designing the Future is a seven-week, practice-driven course for professionals who want to strengthen their strategic toolkit and move beyond reactive problem-solving. Whether you're leading teams, shaping products, or guiding organizational change, this course helps you build strategies that are not only robust but also carefully crafted to anticipate disruption and seize emerging opportunities.

Through a blend of futures thinking and service design, you’ll learn to identify signals of change, explore plausible futures, and translate insights into actionable strategies. Guided by a Service Designer and a Foresight practitioner, you’ll engage in case studies, collaborative exercises, and a mini capstone project rooted in your own context.

You will build future-ready, human-centered strategy skills you can immediately bring back to your team to strengthen decision-making, spark innovation, and lead with greater confidence. By the end, you’ll walk away with tools and approaches that complement your existing strategy skills, sharpen your practice, and empower you to lead with greater clarity, creativity, and confidence in shaping what’s next.

Course outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. Spot signals of change to guide service innovation
   Learn to identify emerging trends and disruptions that could impact people, processes, or technology and use these insights to shape design direction.
   
   
2. Use foresight tools to build future-ready services
   Apply frameworks like STEEP scanning, Three Horizons and Dator’s Four Futures to explore how products/services might evolve and stay relevant across different futures.
   
   
3. Turn future insights into actionable service solutions
   Translate foresight into product/service concepts and prototypes using tools like ecosystem maps, cone of plausibility, and strategy frameworks to address real organizational challenges.
   
   

Format

7 Weeks. Cohort-based. Self-paced online course
You get up-to-date content, discussion threads, and an assignment every week.

Time needed: Approximately 4 hours/week.

Course Content Overview

• Week 0: Welcome & Orientation
• Week 1: Seeing Beyond the Horizon
• Week 2: Scanning for Signals
• Week 3: Evaluation Change Through Multiple Futures
• Week 4: Turning Ideas into Strategy
• Week 5: Prototyping Across Futures
• Week 6: Leading with Futures Thinking