How do we design the future we need?

At the core of my work, this is the central question that drives me: How do we design the future we need? 

I find myself questioning how we design the future of education to create the kind of future in society that we need: one that is more equitable, just, and results in better health outcomes as a result of the holistic design of society. Education is an important intervention space as we consider health outcomes in society, and this idea has percolated and manifested across my professional workspace over the past few years. In my research, I am pursuing this line of questioning to envision new, replicable models for how we approach designing the changes we need in our systems.

Anne-Marie Willis, design philosopher, states that “We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.” We are constantly producing the world we live in, and world is also constantly producing us. This is a co-production, where we are not separate from each other, our environments, or our ways of thinking and being–all of this in inextricably linked. As such, we are both responsible and reactive, complicit and coerced. We have agency, and we also have to accept the outcomes of what we have co-produced. As such, changemaking in society is a bit of a chicken and egg riddle.

Similarly, Tony Fry, design scholar and theorist states, “Our ontology, physiology and psychology significantly arrive out of our being in a designed world. What we do, how we live and for how long, how we appear, our habits, taste and health – these are but some markers of our emergence out of, and our being in, a designed world.” Our health is a product of the world we have designed, and so is our education system.

Environmentalist David Orr situates our health and ecological futures as the result of how those most educated have designed our world, stating, “The truth is that many things on which our future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity. It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the results of work by people with BA’s, BS’s, LLB’s, MBA’s, and PhD’s.”

Thinking about reconciliation, Indigenous futures, and the power of education, the late honorable Murray Sinclair shared this famous quote, that “Education got us into this mess, and it’s education that will get us out of it.”

Kevin Kumashiro, former dean of the school of education at the University of San Franscico, describes the responsibility of institutions of higher education, as necessarily including a movement against its own complicity with oppression. As we consider the design of our world, our role in that as institutions of higher education, and the impacts of these designs on the health of our societies, it’s clear we need practical ways to recognize and act on this complicity.

This is the goal of Designing Shift: creating decolonial pathways and radical interrelationship through transformative education for transition design.