Designing What Doesn’t Exist (Yet)
When I played The Thing from the Future, my cards dealt me a strange mix: Collapse Future, Zoo, and Candy. At first, it felt impossible to connect them, but that’s exactly the fun of it. After some brainstorming, I imagined Creature Candy: brightly colored animal-shaped sweets that give people temporary powers in a post-collapse world. Each candy symbolized a different ability; for example, the giraffe healed wounds, the elephant gave strength, and the cheetah offered speed. In this imagined future, candy wasn’t just a treat; it became both medicine and currency.
That exercise made me realize how much design is a form of storytelling. It’s not only about solving practical problems, rather imagining what could be. Ellen Lupton talks about this in Design is Storytelling, where she reminds designers that creativity thrives when we treat design as a narrative process.
“Sterling introduced the notion of design fiction and diegetic prototypes to account for the ways in which cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability and benevolence.” -Richard Buday (The Reality of Design Fiction: How Storytelling Can Save the World)
He argues that designers must blend visual imagination with narrative depth to make radical ideas resonate. Design fiction, he notes, helps the public recognize the purpose and potential of ideas long before they exist. That perspective really stuck with me, because storytelling gives design the emotional pull it needs to move from concept to reality.
Imagining What Could Be
That’s where design fiction comes in. It’s the practice of using storytelling, visuals, and imaginative thinking to explore potential futures. Rather than predicting what will happen, design fiction helps us visualize what might happen and, more importantly, what we want to happen.
It often connects to scenario planning, a strategy where designers explore multiple possible worlds instead of assuming just one outcome. This helps designers stretch their imagination into strategy.
Visual designers, in particular, bring these imagined worlds to life. We do it through prototypes, mockups, and moodboards to transform abstract ideas into something tangible. Moodboards, for instance, combine familiar imagery in new ways to capture the tone of a world that doesn’t yet exist. These visual experiments help others see the future rather than just read about it.
Imagining Through Design
Playing The Thing from the Future reminded me how powerful imagination can be when it’s structured through a game. It pushed me to think beyond aesthetics and into storytelling, where meaning and context shape visual design.
The game’s playful setup mirrors what design fiction aims to do through exploring uncertainly. In the end, design fiction isn’t about predicting what’s next, but inspiring curiosity and possibility. Through visuals, words, and stories, we gain the confidence to imagine and design the futures we hope to see.
Hey, I’m Ashley!
I am a graphic & interactive designer passionate about creating purposeful, fun, and engaging design. Whether it’s a brand identity, a responsive website, or a social media campaign, I love connecting ideas with strategy to make work that’s not only beautiful, but effective.
