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Three provocations on designing futures worth watching / reflecting…

Over recent weeks, we’ve been hosting talks from visitors who come through Melbourne. Always fun to bring folk into the Design School to ask ourselves what we design, how we come to know communities, technology, and working with multi-species.

Excuse the simple video recordings… straight from the laptop!

Laura Galluzzo and Davide Fassi from POLIMI DESIS Lab shared fifteen years of situated social innovation, embedding researchers in a Milan municipal market for five years as neighbours, not consultants. They were refreshingly honest about challenges: participation is never equal, communities exhaust, and knowing when to exit remains unresolved. Their work inviting people to embody plants or marginalized humans to reimagine public spaces particularly resonated.

Martijn de Waal from Amsterdam explored civic economies and programmable value systems. As blockchain and tokens proliferate, we face a choice: allow Silicon Valley to build surveillance pricing, or design systems recognising care work and non-human stakeholders? A sharp question he posed: “The goal is to socialise the economy, but we might do exactly the opposite, economising the social.” that took me back to the digital economy ‘good’ work that we did at Design Informatics, this remains the knife’s edge we’re walking.

Sara Heitlinger from the Centre for Human‑Computer Interaction Design at City St George’s, University of London, shared her decade designing more-than-human smart cities at Spitalfields City Farm. Rather than efficiency-obsessed approaches, she asks: what if cities recognised interrelations between species? Through algorithmic food justice, seed libraries preserving migrant heritage, and role plays where humans embody river carp to negotiate water governance, she showed how participatory design can include more-than-human voices.

What connects these? Each refuses easy technologisation of social and ecological problems. Each works with communities over years, building trust rather than parachuting in. Each grapples with representing marginalised voices: human communities, invisible care work, or non-human species.
Each confronts a fundamental challenge: how do we enable collective decision-making without drowning people in complexity? Value care without reducing it to points? Use technology to expand rather than constrain possibility?

These questions play out in markets, cooperatives, farms, and river ecosystems. The work is situated, messy, ongoing, exactly as it should be.
The question isn’t whether we’ll have smart cities or civic economies. These are being built now. Who gets to design them, whose values do they encode, and what worlds do they make possible?

RMIT University RMIT College of Design and Social Context

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