Costa, M., Micklethwaite, P., 2024.

Future Foodies: A Speculative Design Approach for Youth Engagement and Policy Shaping

Considering Food Design within future-making allows for innovative exploration of sustainability concerns and opportunities in food. This study uses Speculative Design and AI technologies to engage young people in imagining sustainable food futures. Recognising them as future decision-makers, the study aims to foster social imagination and participatory futuring, with an explorative experiment using both physical and digital prototyping tools. Through co-design sessions with youths aged 8-16 in London, participants discussed and quickly prototyped speculative versions of current foods with sustainability concerns, where initially handdrawn sketches were further refined with AI-generated images. This led to developing a toolkit and workshop model to prompt critical thinking. The concepts designed during the workshops showed informed playfulness, with participants demonstrating increased awareness of sustainable food practices. Encouraging speculative thinking made them more open to hopeful discussions about preferable futures. The toolkit refined and iterated during the workshops enables this experiment to be replicated in different educational settings and shows the potential of being used as a tool for shaping local food policies.