Futurist Program Poised To Transform Interior Design

Strategic foresight represents an increasingly important capability for individuals in all kinds of professional roles, among them managers, researchers, product developers, real estate brokers, executives, entrepreneurs and manufacturers.

One of the leading foresight consulting firms, Future Today Institute (FTI), enables organizations to prepare for an unknowable future with surety, helping its clients decide how they should evolve.

Interior designers are among the professionals whose success rests on seeing into the future. That ability is needed to design spaces for their clients that work both aesthetically and functionally today and for years and perhaps decades to come.

In an effort to quantify the value of forward-looking design thinking, the Chicago-based International Interior Design Association (IIDA), a commercial interior design association with global reach, recently launched the Certified Design Futurist (CDF) program. The IIDA worked with FTI through an exclusive partnership to create a curriculum based on FTI’s recognized and research-supported methodologies. Curriculum development and testing took place earlier this year, with the beta cohort anticipated to finish this autumn. The program’s inaugural class will launch in 2025. Course participants can anticipate delivering consequential change to their firms as they help shape the future of the field.

Valued credential

The CDF curriculum will instruct participants in how to scrutinize 11 macro sources of change, which represent the world’s primary change catalysts.

They are changes in governments, wealth distribution, geopolitics, education, demographics, infrastructure, environment, health, the economy, media and technology. The coursework will also take into account alterations in human-centric behaviors, cultural changes and professional and aesthetic metamorphosis. The result: a broader view of the world and its future, vis-à-vis merely an internal industry perspective.

“Training in foresight expands and formalizes an extant competency that already exists in designers,” says Cheryl Durst, IIDA executive vice president and CEO.

“The design process involves projecting future use cases, and designers are professionals who do their work with an eye to change and evolution. Adding foresight to that equation is a natural fit. And FTI brings decades of rigor and expertise to the field, basing their future scenario building on intensive research and analysis. This kind of training will be a designer’s secret weapon.”

Seeing far

How specifically will the ability to foretell design trends benefit a designer in his or her work? “Think about something like the workplace,” responds Mark Bryan, FTI senior foresight manager.

“Designers could have used foresight over the past decade to identify trends around the value of space in collaboration, impacts to work due to commutes, rising challenges of working due to high levels of stress and more. All of these trends point toward a shift in the way people will want to work in the future. The news and conversations of today are telling us what workers want right now. Using foresight, we can ensure we are continuing to push designs to be prepared for what’s next.”

In practical terms, it is impossible for anyone to predict the future, adds Amy Webb, FTI founder and CEO. But it’s possible to leverage data in a way that anticipates changes. “For example, we could anticipate how people might communicate differently in the future,” Webb says.

“Right now, we are seeing more and more people send messages by speaking to their smartwatches and other wearables. That is really useful data. It tells us that people may be communicating with their family, colleagues and devices in new ways, which fundamentally changes how we design spaces and products. Using this kind of data, we can anticipate and prepare for future needs today.”

The CDF program may begin to create a community of design futurists, while also furnishing designers with an additional tool helping ensure a vibrant future for interior design, Durst says.

“This has broad importance for not only the design industry itself but for any business that relies on design,” she reports, adding, “Down the road, we could see an evolution of the course to include additional layers that address specific market segments, such as healthcare, education, entertainment [and] hospitality.”