Although a strategy for business innovation is to turn a concept into something that’s desirable, viable, commercially successful and that which adds value to people’s lives but in the fast changing world, we are seeing weakening of relationship between product, user and the environment, thereby causing sustainability issues.  A concrete futuristic vision will give overall direction to the efforts; it will also help us channel our energy and resources collectively for a more planned and sustainable future. This paper looks at various future research methods (forecasting techniques) used in the industry and evaluates their relevance and application to designing. The authors identified the importance of factors such as discovery of newer material properties, latest advances in technology realizability, socio-economic trends, cultural paradigms, etc. that have impacted the course of design visualization for the future. Thus, the available forecasting methods were categorized under these three paradigms:-Technological, Human (People-social), and Environmental paradigms. Lastly, this paper identifies a need for coherent forecasting mechanism which makes the product designs of future more predictable, viable and thus, promote sustainability at large.

Authored by: Sugandh Malhotra, Prof. Lalit K. Das, Dr. V. M. Chariar

The full paper can be read here

Malhotra, S., Das, L. K., & Chariar, V. M. (2014). Design Research Methods for Future Mapping. International Association for Development of the Information Society.