Melanie Settele, Eileen Mandir, and Nicolas Prinz
A central question in the great transitions we are facing is how the everyday futures envisioned by citizens can become valuable inputs for policy. These citizen perspectives, which are rarely represented in academic or political discourse, are significant. This paper introduces Public Futures to Policy, a two-step process developed at Design Cultures—Institute for Applied Design Research (dci) at Munich University of Applied Sciences. Public Futures to Policy intentionally integrates two typically distinct modes of engagement: outreach-based conversations with residents in their own environments and structured dialogue with individuals responsible for making binding decisions about urban futures.
The initial step involves the Zukünfte-Kiosk (Futures Kiosk), a mobile, accessible format designed to facilitate neighbourhood conversations about potential futures. The collected responses are qualitatively analysed and visually represented as future images. In the subsequent step, these images are introduced in a Future Policy Workshop, where institutional stakeholders and local decision-makers negotiate desirable futures; citizen perspectives enter this dialogue primarily through the visual scenarios and through subsequent feedback loops with the public.In the subsequent step, these images are introduced in a Future Policy Workshop, where citizen delegates and local decision-makers collaboratively negotiate desirable futures. Design futuring methods are then employed to translate the visual material into guiding visions (Zielbilder), which are concise, orientation-providing images of desirable futures that a are intended to inform policy direction without prescribing specific measures.
Both formats are underpinned by the question of whose futures are rendered legible to policy and through which arteifacts. By transitioning between street-level ethnographic encounters and formal governance settings, Public Futures to Policy engages with distinct communities of practice: lay publics, design researchers, and administrative actors, each possessing unique vocabularies and epistemologies. Navigating these diverse vocabularies constitutes the central challenge of the method, rather than being a secondary consideration.
This paper examines both formats, evaluating their successes, identifying the limitations of participatory future-making, and analyyszing how design futuring—defined here as the use of design methods to explore and create images or narratives of possible futures—can strengthen the connection between citizen imagination and policy decision-making. The approach presented is transferable and facilitates the transformation of plural futures, understood as multiple possible and imagined scenarios, into shared, orientation-providing visions that guide policy direction.
Keywords: design futuring, futures literacy, participatory policy design, citizen deliberation