In a project titled Expeditie RWS2050, Rijkswaterstaat (the executive agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management) aims to imagine a range of possible futures so that it is better prepared to anticipate and deal with the changing situation in the Netherlands. The leading members of the Expedition do so by gathering insights on these possible futures from different perspectives. As part of this project, they invited us, the Transforming Practices group at the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology to use our design research skills to facilitate discussions with a cross-section of the Dutch population, in order to imagine what the future could possibly look like and what it would mean for them. To facilitate these imaginative discussions, we wrote seven short speculative stories and designed a set of physical discussion tools. We recorded the stories and provided an animated picture that corresponded with the story. More information about the project can be found on the Expeditie RWS2050 website. The outcomes of the discussions are being used to create several speculative designs to research how designs can scaffold imagination and discussion among employees at Rijkswaterstaat.
Website: Expeditie RWS2050
Conference paper: Scaffolding shared imagination with tangible design