This research project examines the potential of a pedagogical space for getting design students to focus on ‘the problem of the future’. Its central question is how ‘trans-realist design’ – the act of making the future tangible and bringing it into today’s reality – can create a new attitude that is concerned with opening up multiple potentials for the future.

I noticed that in the current educational environment, neoliberalism has carved out a challenge for higher art education by imposing an increasingly market-driven curriculum that is valued for its economic usefulness, as opposed to the inherent value of the humanities. We must seek an alternative to neoliberal capitalism’s stranglehold on higher art education. In addressing this issue, I propose that design students need to become more aware of the current role of design in society, to challenge established thought and present alternative roles for design. They should be encouraged to recognize their ability to construct and mobilize debate about the future through design.

Through the educational framework developed in this research project, I explore how design students can be stimulated to think outside of the context of existing power structures, or of the actual world. It is crucial for design students to learn to go beyond the present and to exchange the comfort of certainty for an openness to the unknown. To achieve this, I challenge design students to utilize the strategy of opening up potential by creating fractures in their thinking about the past, present, and future and by linking these with opening up the situation. By observing and actively discussing the collective interactions that encourage design students to focus on the problem of the future, my module titled ‘Trans-Realist Design’ enables design students to uncover invisible futures by physical interaction and to eventually actualize a new future world.

Throughout the research project, theoretical and practice-based studies run in parallel with each other, which allows for interplay between the two parts. This research took place in the context of the first year of the Associate Degree Arts & Crafts, a design course given at the Rotterdam Academy; but it is meant to have a broader applicability in higher education for art and design.