Quando il Design incontra il futuro / When Design Shapes Future

The only time in which we can act is the future; the consciousness of the centrality of futures’ study within our discipline has been slow to grow in a scientific and systematic manner. The current strength of the international scientific debate about the study of the future, and Anticipation Studies in particular, allows us to meet this important area of concern with many other disciplines involved in the dimension of time yet to come. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, technology, economy, art, can become sources of practices and useful tools to improve the awareness and investigation on possible futures, for their construction and their narration. This document presents a series of reasoning related to the future that we have named Advanced Design approach. This specific field of study is developed around four main thematic strands: the projection into the far future (long-term), typical of some complex areas such as the automotive sector; the very eccentric and distant spatial or sectorial speculation, that we call extreme design; the contribution of design to continuous innovation processes that neglects the actual speed of need for innovation; and finally the problem finding or the idea that evermore frequently - in the lack of a clear demanding system capable of guiding and filtering the design work - the project brief is generated without client by the designer him-herself. Within the modifications of the value chain, inside a turbulent and indefinable field as that formed by the contemporary markets and the social changes taking place, here is the Advance Design that, contextualized in the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation (FFEI), represents the contribution that design cultures can develop to renew confidence in the resolute production of design activity.