Designing back from the future: building scenarios to engage students with global challenges

How can we move students from critically analysing contemporary challenges – for example urban inequality and unsustainability – to also imagining possible responses to them? In this chapter, which draws on my book Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures (Schwittay, 2021), I show how introducing students to design thinking and methods, including scenario building, is an active learning approach that combines critique and creativity in university classrooms. While design methods can be applied in any course that deals with social, economic or ecological challenges, the activity described here is based on a series of exercises I undertake with students in a third-year specialist module on Urban Futures and is informed by my long-term collaboration with design-educator Paul Braund (Braund & Schwittay, 2006)