(Repost of Paul Clarke’s blog post from https://sociodigitalfutures.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2026/01/21/design-futures-and-collaborating-with-london-college-of-communication-watch-our-new-film/)
In 2025, the Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF) at Bristol University collaborated with MA Service Design at London College of Communication (LCC), setting briefs for students on the Design Futures unit. The outcomes were presented in an exhibition in London, June 2025, which showcased a diverse range of speculative prototypes that explored emerging sociodigital challenges through the lens of critical service design.
We have also produced a short film about the project.
Design Futures and Critical Service Design
Design Futures was taught by Marion Lagedemont, a CenSoF Co-Investigator and Lecturer at LCC, with Silvia Grimaldi, Professor and co-founder of LCC’s Service Futures Lab.
For LCC, design isn’t just about making things work better today; it’s about shaping how we live tomorrow. The unit aims to equip students with the skills to design services that don’t just respond to change but actively help to create it. By focusing on Critical Service Design, students explore the ethical and social dimensions of design, considering who benefits, who is excluded, and what the long-term implications might be.
The 2025 collaboration leveraged CenSoF’s research to explore the interplay between human experiences, digital infrastructures, and sociodigital systems. The collaboration emphasised interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and equipped students with tools to design anticipatory and transformative services, as well as providing CenSoF with new perspectives on topics we have been exploring in our research.
By focusing on alternative futures, the partnership sought to reframe pressing social, ecological, and technological questions through inclusive, critical, and reflective design practices.
Co-Design Process
Through workshops with CenSoF researchers from social sciences, arts, and engineering, design briefs were co-created for student groups to respond to.
The titles of these were:
- Tech and the Body: Emotions, Movement, and Embodiment
- Community Agency and Immersive Technology
- Sovereignty and Governance
Mobility: Borders, Citizenship and Belonging - Future of the Home: Rituals, Relationships and Responsibilities
- Data: Black Box Futures? Understanding the Impacts and Ethics of the Digital Age
All the students’ concepts needed to take into account inequalities and the context of the climate crisis, addressing social justice and sustainability.
From February, six groups of students on the MA Service Design programme worked from these Centre briefs to imagine a set of future scenarios, from the fabulous to the mundane, coming up with critical services or speculative prototypes inspired by the research questions we are engaging with, the contexts and findings we shared.
Interdisciplinary groups of colleagues who co-created the briefs, or had an interest in them, met with each student team to offer input and feedback as they ideated, researched their scenarios and iterated on their designs. In early May, near-final work-in-progress was presented by student teams to their peers, LCC teachers and CenSoF, which was a final opportunity to receive feedback before submitting their work for assessment and preparing it for exhibition.
This exhibition was framed as a Museum of Futures and all the groups designed their materialised speculative services for presentation in this curatorial context.
Example Concepts
Smart & Scored: The New Rules of Home by Ahsan Sajjad, Anagha Kiran Karanje, Anastasiia Grigoreva, and Noora Yasmin
This concept imagined a scored society, where your every domestic move determines your housing future. In the near-future UK rental system, smart sensors transform everyday activities into your “Renting Score”, the invisible gatekeeper to your next address. Landlords and letting agents track your domestic performance through official dashboards, while government systems regulate and certify both tenants and properties.
Too noisy during quiet hours? Score drops. Energy-efficient habits? Points gained. Even how “respectfully” you treat fixtures and fittings feeds into the algorithm that follows you from property to property.
Through speculative artefacts and prototypes, this concept responded to the Future of the Home brief, exploring the hidden costs of convenience, raising questions about surveillance, fairness, and what it really means to feel at home in a data-driven world.
WorldMatch™ – The Emotional Mobility System by Huilong Wang, Kangyuheng Zhu (Evans), Karina Lang, and Nonoka Jinushi
This response to the Mobility brief is a speculative service set in 2036 that reimagines human mobility as a dynamic right rather than a fixed privilege. In this future, walk-in emotional scan booths evaluate individuals’ emotional readiness, resilience, and skills, matching them with jobs, cities, and communities across borders. Citizenship is no longer static but reassigned based on emotional and psychological data.
United Nation Outer Space Union by Jayasmita Das, Michelle Poon, Sara Ng Sheung Wah, and XinKai Wang
This group’s design fiction responds to contemporary concerns around the rapid increase in private satellites and networks, like Starlink, the crowding of Low Earth Orbit, the related risk of space debris, along with the need for secure and equitable access to data.
Addressing the Sovereignty and Governance brief, the group proposed a new body, The United Nations Outer Space Union (UNOSU), dedicated to promoting peaceful and inclusive international cooperation in outer space in a world where satellite access is largely privatised and redistribution of technology is needed.
In this scenario, as private space access becomes increasingly commercialised, i.e. through SpaceX’s exclusive VisaX programme, there is public concern about the tax rises that have resulted from private launching, which has triggered global protests.
Their provocation raised questions around both technological sovereignty and the gaps in governance of space exposed by private satellite constellations and the corporate colonisation of orbit.
Conclusion: critical design as sociodigital research method
In collaboration with colleagues and students at LCC, we wanted to explore how design could test and extrapolate futures claims, and to think through design about key questions emerging for Centre researchers.
By addressing the challenges outlined in our briefs, student groups developed a series of practical examples of how critical service design could be applied to different sociodigital problems and contexts.
This contributes to the Centre’s agenda around developing new capacities and capabilities – including creative methods.
Through their work the students have shown the value, and perhaps also tested the limitations, of design as a tool for understanding and interrogating futures claims. Their explorations have raised new questions about possible relationships between technologies and our social lives, practices and systems. The teams’ speculative prototypes and services have shown how design can intervene in dominant futures narratives and envision alternative sociodigital futures.
Partners:
Centre for SocioDigital Futures (CenSoF) at Bristol University
Date:
2025
Funder:
ESRC
UAL Team:
Marion Lagedamont
Silvia Grimaldi
Links:
CenSoF https://www.bristol.ac.uk/research/centres/sociodigital-futures/
Read our student Diksha Ashok’s blog post on her group project on Community Agency here https://medium.com/@diksha.ashok7/rethinking-community-agency-in-a-probable-future-a-research-through-design-exploration-70b0224053a9
Service Futures Lab 