Making Imagined Futures through Design: The Interplay between Discourse and Materiality

Addressing futures uncertainty requires collective effort to imagine and make futures that are more desirable to organizations and societies. This article investigates how design artifacts can support practitioners in making imagined futures tangible through the interplay between discourse and materiality. We organized a Future Workshop involving sixty practitioners that produced thirty design artifacts and twenty hours of recorded conversations. Through axial coding, we identified five distinct practices unfolding between discourse and materiality, spanning analytical immersion and emotional awakening. First, we contribute to future-making literature by conceptualizing how imagined futures become more tangible through design artifacts before they are implemented within organizations. Second, we unpack the role of emotions — an underexplored dimension in futuremaking — in fueling this process. Finally, we introduce two tools to practitioners, the first titled “Future Moments” and the second titled “Future Experiences of Life.” These two tools aim to facilitate the production of relevant design artifacts for making imagined futures.