.png)
Question
What kind of city will Houston become by its 300th birthday? And how can design leaders plan for people they’ll never meet?
Client
Kirksey Architecture
Services
-
Strategic foresight
-
Futures literacy
-
Speculative design artifacts
-
Design-led research
-
Stakeholder engagement facilitation
Method
In partnership with Kirksey Architecture, we designed a high-participation foresight experience for over 50 civic leaders, architects, and business decision-makers to consider Houston’s built environment in the year 2136. The evening event, titled Designing for People We’ll Never Meet, invited participants into a speculative scenario: a tricentennial celebration accessed via the world’s first operational space elevator.
This provocation reframed climate fatigue and resistance into imaginative, long-view strategy development. Participants were divided into archetypal future groups: Growth, Decline, Discipline, Transformation and guided through a design fiction exercise using signals of change, foresight methodologies, and a speculative artifact to build narratives about Houston's future.
The activation, called Orbitration™, introduced new civic metaphors for Houston as the “liminal city” between Earth and space, and resulted in three immersive future stories: The City on the Hill, Icarus Falling, and Phoenix from the Ash. Each narrative explored radically different outcomes of Houston’s identity as a global, climate-impacted city—highlighting resilience, equity, and stewardship as core themes.
Results
What they asked for
A foresight workshop that sparked creative thinking about Houston’s future.
What they gained
Three provocative future scenarios, strategic themes for long-term planning, and a renewed sense of accountability to future generations.
50+
City planners, architects, and business owners in the room.
3
Future narratives written using Dator's arcs.
4
Speculative artifacts to keep insights alive after the event.
Houston's Tricenntenial
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.