The Futures Bazaar is a futures workshop developed by Filippo Cuttica and Stuart Candy, designed to encourage participants to step outside their comfort zones and create products that are imaginative, unconventional, and based in future scenarios. Rather than attempting to predict exactly what the future will look like, the workshop encourages designers to explore possible, plausible, and unexpected futures. The overall aim is to support creative and critical thinking by encouraging designers to question existing ideas and consider how design decisions may impact society on a wider level.
We completed the Futures Bazaar workshop as a class during our Contemporary Design Culture module. To begin, we were divided into teams and given worksheets to help generate ideas and guide our thinking. We firstly completed these worksheets individually before coming together as a group to discuss our ideas and finalise a shared concept. We then moved into the ideation phase, where each team member designed their own interpretation of the chosen concept. Following this, we regrouped to select a final design direction. Once the concept was agreed upon, we brought the idea to life using objects sourced from around the classroom to help visualise our future product.
After completing the design process, each group was given fake banknotes to invest in the projects they felt demonstrated the greatest innovation and creativity. This was an engaging way to explore how other groups approached the same task from different perspectives. Overall, I really enjoyed the Futures Bazaar experience and found it extremely valuable. It encouraged me to move beyond conventional design thinking and showed how limiting preconceived ideas can be to creativity. The workshop introduced me to a new way of thinking about design, which I believe will be very useful in my future practice.
