Creative AI for Environmental Futuring
How might we identify potential consumer preferences in 2050 using community-driven design processes?
Bigwidesky, a communication and foresight consultancy, wanted to help their community explore speculative design as a tool for strategic foresight. We collaborated on a five-month engagement to host a community-driven, three-part interactive webinar series focused on futures literacy and speculative design. The series introduced Bigwidesky’s five-step foresight process—probleming, researching, imagining, gathering insights, and strategizing—while guiding participants in co-designing artifacts and products from 2050. Deliverables included speculative design artifacts, narratives, and a takeaway futures starter kit.
Between sessions, our team conducted sociocultural research to refine the community’s speculative concepts, ultimately producing the Human+ 2050 product catalog featuring three finalized, future-forward artifacts. Visual renders and narratives brought these artifacts to life, immersing participants in a plausible 2050 future and demonstrating how speculative design can inform business strategy. This project exemplified participatory futures literacy, with each artifact grounded in sociocultural signals of change and shaped by the collective imagination of Bigwidesky’s community.
Client
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
Services
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Futures literacy training
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Creative AI consulting and ethics training
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Strategic foresight
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Design-led research
Question
How can policymakers ethically leverage creative AI tools to imagine more hopeful futures?
Method
This highly-participatory workshop educated policymakers on the wide world of creative AI. Led by Liminal for the OECD Strategic Foresight Unit, the session served a dual purpose: 1) to unveil and demystify various AI tools and 2) critically assess these tools, uncovering aspects that are positive, negative, or concerning.
Leveraging speculative design techniques and futures methodologies, policymakers imagined familiar geographic locations in 2040. As each scenario was fed into creative AI tools, participants critiqued the resulting environmental narrative. Through ongoing dialogue and strategic imagination, policymakers identified strong biases toward North American imagery and a gap in understanding diversity of culture.