Design Futures to support Sustainable Food practices

Planet Earth’s temperature is rising every year and scientists agree that, if this trend persists, humanity will witness an irreversible damage (Schmitz, 2015). To tackle climate change and safeguard human and planet’s health, a radical green transformation becomes urgent. The food sector represents one of the largest contributors to carbon footprint production and Earth’s degradation. Approximately 20-30% of global human induced GHG emissions is due to food production, processing, and distribution (Fresán and Sabaté, 2019). In this scenario, cutting-edge technologies can be employed to foster innovations within the food sector enabling a green transformation and minimizing negative effects. To creatively envision the possible brighter futures of food, there is an emergent need for new design processes (Meyer & Norman, 2019). This is the aim of the Digital Creativity for developing Digital Maturity future skills (DC4DM) European project which disseminates an innovative educational model based on the Design Futures approach to equip new generations of professionals with a future-proof skill set to shape preferable future scenarios. After framing the connection between the food sector and climate change, the paper will introduce the Design Futures process providing a real-life experience of its application in multidisciplinary team of students.