Formulating a Descriptive Framework and Tagging system for Design Futures Practice Cases: Enabling Heuristic Tool Development for Design Education and Creative Inspiration

There has been a growing trend to extend the domain of futures studies into practical realms by integrating materials, methodologies, and perspectives from design and the arts. “Design Futures” is an emerging field that arises from the interaction between design and foresight, holding great potential for expansion and development. However, there is still a lack of heuristic design tools to empower the creation of practice cases in design futures. Due to the intricacies of the sub-genres of Design Futures practice cases, our prior work included the development of a universal case description framework with a quantitative tagging system to place the different genres of cases on a common ground for study. Firstly, the study established a global descriptive framework and tagging system (4 segments, 7 primary labels, and 36 secondary labels) around 5 Design Futures sub-types through a qualitative approach. Secondly, the study invited 109 participants from five different subjects areas to conduct an empirical study to validate the proposed framework and quantify the tagging system. The results show that the rationality of the framework is preliminarily confirmed; the strength of the correlation between genres and labels is weak; in terms of the quantification of labels, the study produces 62 valid secondary labels (positive 29, negative 33), accompanied by quantitative data as the basis for recommendation, forming a creativity-enabling, content-rich labelling system that can reflect the characteristics and differences between the many genres of Design Futures. Finally, the study proposes three modes of heuristic design (confirmatory, constructive and open-ended), which provide rules to guide the use and collocation of the tagging system. The results of this research have deepened the understanding of the concepts and structures of knowledge in the field of Design Futures, which will play a more extensive role in design pedagogy and creative inspiration contexts.