Making Imagined Futures through Design: The Interplay between Discourse and Materiality

Addressing futures uncertainty requires collective effort to imagine and make futures that are more desirable to organizations and societies. This article investigates how design artifacts can support practitioners in making imagined futures tangible through the interplay between discourse and materiality. We organized a Future Workshop involving sixty practitioners that produced thirty design artifacts and twenty hours of recorded conversations. Through axial coding, we identified five distinct practices unfolding between discourse and materiality, spanning analytical immersion and emotional awakening. First, we contribute to future-making literature by conceptualizing how imagined futures become more tangible through design artifacts before they are implemented within organizations. Second, we unpack the role of emotions—an underexplored dimension in future-making—in fueling this process. Finally, we introduce two tools to practitioners, the first titled “Future Moments” and the second titled “Future Experiences of Life.” These two tools aim to facilitate the production of relevant design artifacts for making imagined futures. • Futures uncertainty faced by organizations and society calls for exploring future-making as a set of practices to make imagined futures tangible. • Design artifacts hold great potential to support practitioners in making imagined futures tangible through the interplay between discourse and materiality. • A Future Workshop with sixty practitioners explored imagined futures of human well-being using the Future Moments and Future Experiences of Life templates. • This study contributes to future-making literature by theorizing a process that makes imagined futures tangible through the iterative interplay of discursive material practices and by highlighting the role of emotions in future-making.