Innovation & Future Thinking
Academic Program
The Innovation and Future Thinking is a course is offered at IED Barcelona each summer. The program is co-directed between me and John V. Willshire.
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Program Context
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” – Arundhati Roy
We live in a time often described as a crisis of imagination. Faced with accelerating technological change, environmental breakdown, and political uncertainty, it can feel easier to picture collapse than genuine transformation. Yet if we can’t imagine different futures, we can’t design or build them.
The Innovation and Future Thinking course was created in 2014 to cultivate the skills and capacities needed to imagine, design, and prototype alternative futures in the present.
While the course has evolved over the years, its core structure remains constant:
- a highly relevant local theme,
- a stacked lineup of inspiring guest instructors,
- a series of site visits that ground abstract ideas in lived realities, and
- ambitious, collaborative project work.
Students leave not only with new tools, but with a renewed confidence in their ability to sense emerging signals, reimagine possibilities, and actively shape the world to come.
We’ve been fortunate to collaborate with a remarkable roster of practitioners, including Christina Bifano, Elisabet Roselló, Scott Smith, Natalie Kane, Deb Chachra, Nic Holden, Andres Colmenares, Dan Hill, Laura Cleries, Susan Cox-Smith, Fabien Girardin, Tobias Revell, Nyangala Zolho, and Stuart Candy. Each year, our guests bring fresh perspectives and methods to help students explore the theme at hand.
Over the years, we’ve addressed the futures of food, identity, payments, urban environments, and more.
In this Summer Course Innovation and Future Thinking, students learn how to detect signs of change, organize ideas into comprehensible models, find new ways to assess possible futures, identify potential barriers and opportunities, and design innovative ideas, products and services.
This course, taught in English, focuses on the strategic, innovative and creative aspects of future thinking. Starting with data collection and modelling, exploring and adopting narrative development, strategic foresight, prototyping, and developing effective mechanisms to inform different audiences about new products and services. This new know-how will be put to good use in the form of a final project providing solutions for the problems found.
Starting from the question, "Why think about the future?" students will discover the fundamental concepts of futuring from a theoretical perspective. In this first part of the course we focus on trend identification and analysis, scanning for weak signs and macro trends. This phase is characterised by an observational analysis of urban environments.
The focus then shifts to creating scenarios, roadmaps and timelines, using retrospection and creative ideas to develop new narratives.
Futurists, innovators and designers will show us how to use these techniques to put theory into practice.
We will study innovation practices and processes and see how they’re used by both major companies and start-ups.
This course, taught in English, focuses on the strategic, innovative and creative aspects of future thinking. Starting with data collection and modelling, exploring and adopting narrative development, strategic foresight, prototyping, and developing effective mechanisms to inform different audiences about new products and services. This new know-how will be put to good use in the form of a final project providing solutions for the problems found.
Starting from the question, "Why think about the future?" students will discover the fundamental concepts of futuring from a theoretical perspective. In this first part of the course we focus on trend identification and analysis, scanning for weak signs and macro trends. This phase is characterised by an observational analysis of urban environments.
The focus then shifts to creating scenarios, roadmaps and timelines, using retrospection and creative ideas to develop new narratives.
Futurists, innovators and designers will show us how to use these techniques to put theory into practice.
We will study innovation practices and processes and see how they’re used by both major companies and start-ups.
Students engaging in collective signals work in class.
Students engaging with the city as an extension of the classroom.
Related Publications
Toban Shadlyn & John V. Willshire. Reflections on Innovation and Future Thinking. Smithery Blog. May 1, 2024.
Toban Shadlyn & John V. Willshire. Taking Care of Water. Smithery Blog. May 11, 2023.
Toban Shadlyn & John V. Willshire. Reflections on Innovation and Future Thinking. Smithery Blog. May 1, 2024.
Toban Shadlyn & John V. Willshire. Taking Care of Water. Smithery Blog. May 11, 2023.
Index