Futures Intelligence: Transformative Approaches to Future-Making

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Date & Time: Wednesday, September 17, 14:00–15:30 EEST
Location: Lumituuli Auditorium, Dipoli, Aalto University

Overview

Cultivating intelligence to navigate uncertain futures requires framing strategic questions and decisions in new ways. Using speculative design techniques and shifting the way organizations engage with predictive systems, these presentations demonstrate how ethnography and research can shape tomorrow. 

Session Leader: Charley Scull

Presentations

From "Which Percentage of..." to "What if...": Futures Thinking and Making in a Traditional Manufacturing Organization

Camille Ronceray, User Experience Researcher, Coloplast A/S

This case study demonstrates the integration of futures thinking and making into the innovation process of a traditional healthcare manufacturing organization. Addressing the users of a decade in the future is a three-fold challenge for research, innovation, and an organizational culture uncomfortable with ambiguity. The work offers a methodological approach to integrating Design Fiction, Speculative Design, and Strategic Foresight, as well as lessons from the journey, including the difficulties and joys of overcoming biases and resistance to futures intelligence. Research Case Study

Presenter & Author

Camille Ronceray is a French User Experience Researcher working in the Healthcare industry. Some years after switching from agency to in-house, Camille is still working to understand both the Danish and the corporate culture. In 2010, Camille realized how much design fiction and trends could help them understand people – thanks to a magazine with a snail on the cover. Outside of work, Camille uses their research skills to curate restaurants and spot toilets. You will find Camille reading non-fiction books, making jokes or looking for dessert.

Disrupting Intelligent Mobilities: Designing Ethnographic Pedagogy for Multi-stakeholder Innovation

Vaike Fors, Professor, Halmstad University
Rachel Charlotte Smith, Associate Professor, Aarhus University
Sarah Pink, Professor, Monash University
Jesper Lund, Associate Professor, Halmstad University

This paper addresses the growing disconnect between technical and social intelligences in the development of autonomous vehicle technologies. By introducing a design ethnographic co-learning pedagogy, it offers a novel methodology for fostering collaborative, human-centered innovation across sectors, grounded in the lived realities and values of communities. By redefining stakeholder engagement, this work establishes a more grounded, inclusive path forward for the future of intelligent mobility. Paper

Presenters & Authors

Vaike Fors is Professor of Design Ethnography at Halmstad University. Vaike is the director of the REBEL Research Program (Re-Imagining Future Smart Living – Beyond the Living Lab). Her recent work includes the co-authored book Design Ethnography. Research, Responsibilities and Futures (2022) and the co-edited De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures (2024).

Rachel Charlotte Smith is Associate Professor of Human-Centred Design at Aarhus University. Her research focuses on everyday digital transformations and sustainable technology futures through participatory design and design anthropology. Publications include Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design (2025), Design Anthropology Special Issue (2022), and Design Anthropological Futures (2016).

Sarah Pink (PhD, PhD Hcx2, FASSA) is a futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Sarah is Laureate Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Lab and FUTURES Hub at Monash University. Her recent works include the book Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future (2023) and Can We Trust Technology? (2025), and the documentaries Digital Energy Futures (2022) and Air Futures (2024).

Jesper Lund is Associate Professor of Informatics at Halmstad University. His research focuses on co-design in living labs with a specific interest related to the field of future mobility. Publications include Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2025), Journal of Responsible Innovation (2024), and CoDesign (2024).

In the Quest for Certainty, Are We Trading Intelligence for Knowledge?

Maia Green, Professor of Anthropology, University of Manchester

This PechaKucha reflects on the status of ethnography within knowledge economies, which produce models for understanding contemporary worlds. The pragmatic approach to home building I experienced in Tanzania holds lessons for researchers: people built over many years, adjusting to changing circumstances and prioritizing adapted environments for living over fixed ideas about form. When we overvalue our existing theories and models, do we trade intelligence for knowledge? PechaKucha

Presenter & Author

Maia Green is an anthropologist writing on international development, policy and institutional change, based on extensive fieldwork in Tanzania. Her publications address community development, participatory methods and positionality in knowledge economies. She is currently working in economies of self organised house building in Tanzania. As well as teaching core anthropology courses, Maia Green teaches Business Anthropology to interdisciplinary students at the University of Manchester.