The Design Futures Initiative (DFI) launched its first meetup chapter in San Francisco in 2015 and produced its first conference in 2017. Since then organisation has flourished, growing to over 40 chapters and 2 annual conferences with thousands of members. As a volunteer-run organisation such rapid growth creates several challenges, including that of having a clear vision to progress towards. 

In a fast-paced engagement, our goal was to help the DFI to think about their own future and ensure alignment on a common set of values, a vision, and a mission. Additionally, we aimed to make strategic recommendations that could help them manage the rapid growth they were experiencing.

The Design Futures Initiative is a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco that facilitates programmes and conversations on the ethical, environmental, political and economic impacts of future products and services. Their main activities include running the global network of Speculative Futures meetups and producing the US and EU versions of the annual Primer conference.

We worked with the Design Futures Initiative through our Pro Bono scheme. They were experiencing rapid growth within their organisation and sought our help in deciding their strategy going forward. In an initial research phase, we conducted two types of research — inward-facing and outward-facing. The inward-facing activities we conducted involved interviews with people across the whole organisation; the organisation founder, board members, advisors, chapter leaders, and meetup attendees. For the outward-facing activities we researched other creative and futures-based professional networks, from Ladies Wine and Design to the World Future Society, we built an understanding of the different shapes and growth trajectories similar networks can take. 

The information collected from these research efforts was synthesised into three main outputs:

• Possible Futures:
  A series of future scenarios for the DFI, which demonstrate the breadth of possibility for the organisation’s next steps. 
  

• Values
  A set of draft organisational values, which represent the shared aspirations of the individuals we spoke to from across the DFI. 
  

• Risk and Challenges
  Key risks and challenges that the research suggested the DFI was facing or would face in the near future. 

‍

Cross-referencing the values with the future scenarios we made conclusions about which (parts) of the scenarios were ‘preferable’ for the DFI. We used this to make strategic recommendations around branding, governance, organisational structure, and additional activities to help them move towards that preferable vision.

‍