Futures Thinking and Service Design, with Dr. David J. Staley
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In this episode of Hello Everybody, Darwin Muljono sits down with Dr. David J. Staley—futurist, historian, and eclectic academic—to explore what it means to think like a futurist and how that mindset transforms service design.
Dr. Staley draws on his deep experience as a writer, designer, educator, and public intellectual, offering a compelling look at how speculative design can unlock bold innovation. His work bridges the disciplines of history and design at The Ohio State University, and his award-winning futures writing brings a rare clarity to complexity.
Whether you’re in service design, education, or simply curious about where the world is headed, this conversation is a must-listen.
About Our Guest
David J. Staley is Associate Professor of History and (by courtesy) Design at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education, Visionary Histories, and co-author of Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets. He serves as president of Columbus Futurists, hosts the Voices of Excellence podcast, and writes the “Next” futures column for Columbus Underground—earning him the 2022 Best Freelance Writer award from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists.
What You’ll Learn
- What “futures thinking” actually looks like in practice
- How service designers can apply foresight to complex systems
- Why uncertainty isn’t something to avoid—but something to design into
- Practical starting points for integrating long-term thinking into your work
Hosted by Darwin Muljono
Darwin Muljono is a Senior Service Designer at Harmonic Design, where he brings systems thinking, critical realism, and design futures to tackle complex, often systemic challenges. With roots in design research and philosophy, his work draws from ecological, sociological, and political-economic perspectives, always grounded in curiosity and an urge to understand the deeper forces shaping the human experience.
On Hello Everybody, Darwin brings that same lens to conversations with thinkers, designers, and researchers, asking big questions and exploring new futures.
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Transcript
From Harmonic Design, welcome to service design. Hello, Everybody. A podcast where we make sense of the messy human side of surface design.
Darwin (host)
So hello, everybody. My name is Darwin, and today I will be your host. This is the first episode of hopefully many more to come, where we’ll be talking with experts on the topic of their research or practice that intersects with surface design.
Today, we’ll be covering the topic of futures with Dr. David J. Staley. David J. Staley is a writer, designer, futurist, historiographer, presenter, educator, adviser, and journalist, and was recently described as an eclectic academic and as a polymath. He is an associate professor in the department of history and design at the Ohio State University and is the author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education, the co-author of Knowledge, Talents, Colleges, and Universities as Talent Magnets, and the author of Visionary Histories, a collection of his essays about the future. He is the host of the Voice of Excellence podcast and president of Colbus Futurist, a local think tank. In 2022, he was awarded best freelance writer by the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists for his next futures column with Columbus Underground. He is also my former professor when I was in grad school at the Ohio State University, and we have been having this conversation before about futures quite a bit.
Differences between futures and other design disciplines
But to begin with, why don’t you help all of us understand what the future is? How would you explain to designers that would say But I have been designing for the future, right? I’m doing improvements constantly for user experiences for future states. I’m doing this, future state journey. In what significant way is futures different from current design disciplines?
Dr. Staley (guest)
Thank you, Darwin. And may I also add that you were one of my best students when you were one of my graduate students. I am so delighted to be talking with you today. So, in the context of this conversation, I describe futures or future thinking or futuring as the study of systems, or rather, how systems are going to behave in the future. That maybe needs a little bit of a little bit of explanation. In my practice, in my writing, or anytime I’m asked to give a talk on the future, most people want to know about the future state of some system. They don’t frame it that way. They don’t say it that way, but they’ll say, tell us about you know the future of healthcare, or tell us about the future of work or What’s the future of artificial intelligence. And what they’re not looking for is some sort of, you know, pinpoint prediction. Well, on August 14th, 2035, this is what’s going to happen. What they really want to know is what a system is and how it is going to be configured in the future. And so I sometimes will say that the future, that future, especially as applied to design, is essentially systems design. There are sort of three broad reasons that we engage in this sort of work in this sort of futures work. The first is to try to identify what the main drivers and blockers are of these systems. From drivers and blockers come trends. So what are the trends that are going to occur over the next 5, 10, 15 years, and how will those trends interact with each other to produce a changed environment, whatever that environment might look like? And then our goal is to try to understand what that world is going to look like and then to ask what it is going to mean to design for that environment for that future world, and that could b,e you know, design, product design, experience design, services ,whatever the case may be. Another reason we engage in futuring is, in a sense, to assess or to think through changes that we are instituting or decisions that we’re making today. If we do this, what’s going to be the outcome? How is it going to ripple throughout some sort of system? We tend to sort of think, well, we’ll design a product because we want to be able to solve this or to have this particular feature, and think only about that. And it’s sometimes said, well, you know how come people can’t see the ill effects or can’t understand the other kinds of negative consequences of technology. And I say typically that’s because they didn’t look, they didn’t think it through. So futuring is as much about trying to understand what all of those implications are going to be. And then a third approach is that it goes by different names. It’s sometimes called backcasting. I prefer idealized design, but it’s essentially a technique or an approach where you design the future that you want. You start with a rich description of a system at some point in the future that you would like to see. So, we would like to eliminate greenhouse gases from the environment, right? That’d be a terrific endpoint. And then what you do is you work backward from that. You essentially reverse-engineer the future, right? What has to happen to achieve that ideal future? And then you work back to the to present and what you then have is a you know sort of a crude road map, for how to act, how to proceed going forward.
Dr. Staley’s journey to futures
Darwin
Excellent. You mentioned something that is very close to my heart, which is about systems, and you’ve been talking about reverse engineering and stuff like that. Whenever I talk to my friend about you or if I want to introduce you to someone, one of the things that’s very often comes up is a kind of amused bewilderment, kind of like a paradox. So you started from history, that’s your background, but now you’ve engaged in futures, and when you talk about system,s I’m just curious to understand a little bit your history of how you get from history to futures, and if there is an underlying saying or themes, like a system, for example, that ties them together.
Dr. Staley
The answer to that second question is yes, and I will certainly get to that, but your question is a good one, and my PhD is in history. I still teach in a history department. But you’re right. I’ve been thinking about the future for the last 25 years or so, both in my academic practice and also professionally through some consulting that I’ve done with clients. But you know my interest in the future goes back to my childhood. I I I was I read a lot of science fiction. If I read anything, I read science fiction, and I didn’t read history. I didn’t really have an interest in history. The summer before I went off to university, I had a job that afforded me the opportunity to have a lot of downtime, and I read that summer, I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I read all three books that summer, and I know that I think it was HBO just did a series on the Foundation. But for those who haven’t read it, the series centers around a science fiction or a fictional academic discipline called psycho history. We’re using statistics, especially of the mass number of people, the main character was able to predict with astonishing precision how the future was going to unfold. And boy, I was just mesmerized by these books. And I said, that’s what I want to study when I get to university. I want to study the future. I want to study psycho history. And then I got to university and no, there is no department of futures. There’s certainly no department of psycho history. And so I think I ended up in the closest thing, which was history. Which you know had, as it turns out, and I probably only realized this in hindsight, had a lot of the same sort of ideas that I wanted to pursue, except rather than looking at the future, historians look at the past. My second book, you didn’t. I wrote a book in 2007 called History and Future, which is essentially a book describing how the historical method can be used to study the future. Mhm. I was in graduate school and had a terrific advisor. I studied German history for my PhD, and I was getting my degree about the time that the Berlin Wall fell, and he would gather us together every week essentially to read the newspaper and just try to understand and figure out what was going on in Germany. And as part of what we did in this seminar was we did a little bit of forecasting. We did a little bit of futuring about what postunification Germany might look like, and as it turns out, we were pretty prescient I think, in some of our predictions. at about that time I was having I was at a family gathering and my wife’s cousin asked me I think just to make conversation so what’s happening in Germany you know I studied Germany what’s happening in Germany so I told him what we were were working on he says well we should have you come into our company and talk to our leadership about this we do a lot of business in Germany I said oh gosh I said you know all I do is read the newspaper and they said yeah, but you can help us make sense of all this and that was that was a very powerful lesson for me. I think that the ability to make sense of the world is something that people would be willing to pay for. And I think it was from that that I got my interest in the academic study of the future. I discovered that there were philosophers and sociologists and others who think about the future, and that sort of moved me along that path. How do I connect that to history? I’ve come to the conclusion, and I’ve only come to this within the last five years or so, that if futurists study the potential behavior of future systems, historians study the past behavior of complex systems, right?
Why teach futures in design?
Darwin
It’s interesting you mentioned 1980 as a kind of turning point for you too, because I think roughly that time Francis Fukuyama also published The End of History, and I thought that that’s a kind of parallel to stop studying history and look to the futures. The other thing that I referenced earlier is that I’m your grad student, I’m in the design department. One of the things that I’m curious about is you have a courtesy appointment with the design department, and then you are researching and studying, and teaching futures in the design department. Why specifically do you think you are teaching in the design department rather than in psychology or engineering, and so forth? What’s appealing about design?
Dr. Staley
A really, really good question, Darwi,n and so I, I there are I suppose, two answers. One serious and one maybe a little glib. The serious one is that I think in some ways, designers already have a sense of the future. I mean you began our conversation by suggesting that maybe designers already look forward in their work, even if they don’t necessarily use the formal techniques that futurists employ. and so I think in some ways design is is a welcoming place in the academy for futures because as I suggested at least in this country there are there are very like on one hand you can count the nber of places that you can get a degree of any kind in future studies. And so I think in some sense, design is sort of welcoming.
The glib response I was going to give is a colleague whom she and I have known for years, and in fac,t it was around futuring work. She’s a designer who was interested in futures work, joined the department of design and thought, and said this guy, Staley, might be a good person to bring in on a courtesy appointment. So I suppose in that sense it was it was a serendipity. Still, I do believe that of all the departments you list, their design is probably the most welcoming to these sorts of approaches, and I can say with absolute confidence we’re so glad that you’re there to teach us about futures.
How is futures being applied, and what are its current limitations
Darwin
It’s June 2025. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about where futures currently being applied, and where they are most effectively applied? And I’m curious about some of the current limitations of the practical applications of futures, too, if practical application is a fair question to ask.
Dr. Staley
No, it is. It absolutely is. So I’d mentioned earlier that I had a formal consulting practice for about a decade or so, and now I do it sort of occasionally and informally, but I mean, I could list a number of companies or industries that hire futurists that have had in-house futurists. They tend to be larger, sort of global corporations. I think I think there’s a sense that you know if you have the staffing that sort of capacity to be able to to have futurists but I should also say that I think in in some ways a futurist on staff or even in a consulting arrangement is a hard sell for many organizations because very few feel that they have the luxury to look ahead or rather they think you know we’re so mired in problems right now that we can’t really look beyond you know next quarter. And I’ve been told that on many, occasions, I think in some ways it’s an American obsession In some ways, you know there are there are some companies that I’ve worked with, let’s say some Japanese firms. I’ll I’ll just leave it at that. Many who are not only thinking about the future but are looking very, very far ahead, at least in comparison to the way Americans look. There’s one company that’s looking out to 2050, for instance. and so I think that’s probably the the the the biggest challenge facing foresight that that thinking about the long term or even thinking about tomorrow is something of a luxury until something catastrophic happens right so after the great recession in 2008 I was getting all kinds of business oh you know tell us what else we’ve missed tell us and then as things start to settle back down to normal there’s a sense well we don’t need to we don’t need to worry about the future anymore until the next crisis comes along.
How can futures and service design work together
Darwin
Right. Right. And, interestingly, you talk about the challenges too, because one of my experiences with futures being implemented is that it usually fails, and that’s the reason why I try to frame it from the perspective of practical applications, because the ones that I’ve been exposed to are, and it’s an American firm too. It’s more like a research hub where the practice of it or some practice of it is very sci-fi oriented, and perhaps I’m just not mature enough to be able to digest it in a way that could be practically applicable in the real world. But at harmonic, one of the things that we have been very good at, speaking of very welcoming as a design discipline, is to explore various aspects of cross-discipline and integrate them back into service design. And I’m curious, and we’ve been pursuing it very seriously in recent years, but I’m curious from your perspective, in what way do you think that futures would be best intersected with service design, or how would they best work together?
Dr. Staley
So it’s becoming a successful marriage. You know, I think it goes back to the way I characterized future studies or futures research at the beginning of our talk. And I think it comes down to you what it is that you want to aid a client in seeing. So, first of all, what is the world going to look like? Let’s say in five or 10 years or something like that, what’s going to be the shape of the world, and then start designing for that sort of world. So when we talk about service design, when we’re talking about a human-centric sort of design, the idea is that we’re not designing for how people are, how they behave, or how they think today, but how they’re going to think and behave. And sometimes in the business, we call this the unarticulated needs of a consumer. And that is one thing that futuring and foresight work has done. I sometimes describe this as a kind of anticipatory business development, and that’s a really important thing, I think that foresight can do. Yeah. But as I also said, when we use idealized design techniques, we can also be proactive. we can We can sort of create the world that we want. And so instead of reacting to the trends, reacting to the drivers, we can have some agency in designing the world that we want. Yeah. And it strikes me that that has all kinds of important positive consequences for service design. Mhm. So we are almost at time, and I want to close with a final question. You taught me, and I hope I learn well enough that, as futurists, we don’t want to predict. We don’t want to make predictions, but it’s important to be able to scan the horizon, attain some foresight, and have the agencies shape the future as well. Dare I ask you to put yourself in the futures that is right now and paint a picture, maybe for all of us to understand where you see the future is potentially shaping, and maybe it could be in the adjacent field to design, but with the other disciplines as well. Well, it’s a good question. I believe that futures and foresight will increasingly play a role in higher education. I mean, we’ll have to sort of sort of train people for this. and whether that means you know futures is taught in a design program. My ideal picture is that futures is its own it’s its own discipline. You can get a degree in futures, as I said. Right now, you can only do that in just a handful of places, at least in this country. It’s a little more popular in Europe, for instance. And then, I think we’ll start to see, and we’re already starting to see in some organizations, we’re seeing job listings and things for a futurist or a corporate futurist or someone, in-house, that’s thinking in these terms. I have long said that futures thinking is particularly good practice for executives, someone in the suite.
I’d like to think that we’ll have many companies that will have a chief futures officer, that person or that office that is looking ahead, anticipating what the world is going to look like but also playing the role in the organization as we’ve said designing the future and doing that responsibly. I really do think that thinking ahead, even when you’re doing idealized design, is a big part of what you’re doing, which is identifying the potential problems, not just simply the perceived benefits of some sort of decision that we’re making in the present. I think that futures training is particularly good training for leadership, not just simply in business, but I would say in government as well. there was a piece that came out a few years ago from the program marketplace the public radio program marketplace that said you know we have corporate futurists now why are there no futurists in government and I see that as as as another sort of frontier u that and and I don’t know where in government this person would sit but the idea is that you would have someone advising legislators the executive branch on what are the trends what are global trends and and I think also how to design the future. I really do think that futurists belong anywhere that decisions are being made.
Darwin
That’s a great end to the interview. This has been very informative. Some aspects are very thought-provoking to me. I’m so glad to talk to you, Dr. Staley. So glad for you to be here.
Dr. Staley
Thank you so much. Thank you, Darwin.
Darwin
It was a real pleasure and a real honor to be with you. Thanks for tuning in to Hello, Everybody. If today sparked something new or even just got you curious, head to thisishharmonic.com to see how we co-create services that are more human, inclusive, and sustainable.