Designing Foresight and Foresighting Design: Opportunities for Learning and Collaboration via Scenarios Andy Hines & Danila Zindato Abstract Foresight and design are growing closer together. The two fields are sharing a key tool: scenarios. The piece opens by highlighting the growing relationship between the fields. It compares the generic process frameworks they use. It then reviews the expanding roles of scenarios in design. It concludes by suggesting there is an opportunity for futurists and designers to learn from one another’s use of scenarios and that pressure on both fields to expand their scope and capabilities suggest even more collaboration between the two in the future. Introduction The concept of anticipation is a widespread phenomenon. As Roberto Poli observes, lots of systems use a predictive model -- life in all its varieties is anticipatory, the brain works in an anticipatory way, society and its structures are anticipatory, even non-living or non-biological systems can be anticipatory. 1 The anticipatory way of thinking is not exclusive to futurists. Designers (and others) share this orientation. Indeed, the relationship between design and foresight is gaining interest within various fields of research around topics such as organizational systems, innovation processes, and design practices. 2 This papers suggests that there is an increasingly strong relationship between foresight and design, based on their orientation to the future and an increasing sharing of tools used for creating and narrating possible alternative futures. In design as well as foresight, one of the most important tools is scenario building. This paper will focus more on how designers use scenarios in order to provide lessons for futurists – a future piece could explore what designers can learn futurists’ use of scenarios. This work builds on a collaboration between a futurist Hines and a designer Zindato. The futurist hosted the designer as a visiting international doctoral student (already an accomplished designer in the field). Zindato’s goal was to learn more about how futurists use scenarios, and in the process shared a perspective on how designers use them. The collaboration, thus, was based on each seeking to learn more about how the other used scenarios. Our hypothesis was that futurists tended to emphasize a strategic use of scenarios --what should we do? -- whereas designers tended to emphasize the use of scenarios for envisioning solutions -- how should we do it? Our observation of the growing collaboration between the fields also led us to hypothesize that these historical emphases where changing, that is, futurists were learning from how designers use scenarios and vice versa. This piece is written primarily from the futurist perspective, given the readership of this journal. It suggests an opportunity for futurists to learn from what designers are doing – and vice versa – and it suggests greater collaboration between the two fields in the future.