Future Design for Sustainable Nature and Societies

Let us create a society for future generations, but how can we do that? Future Design (FD), introduced in 2015 in Japan, is a new approach to addressing this question by formulation of new theories, verifying them through experiments, and then practicing them in real communities, municipalities, and private companies. FD is "the design and implementation of social systems that activate participants’ futurability. Futurability refers to “the possibility that the present generation will put the interests of the future generations ahead of its own.†However, the society in which we live today based upon markets and democracy is one that suppresses our futurability. For this reason, FD concerns with designing a society where people can change their behavior by activating their own futurability. It seems that we have focused only on making our generation better that we have been making future failures that likely cause excessive burden for future generations. Such examples are disruption of carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, phosphorus cycle, and so on, and then the concept of Imaginary Future Person (IFP) is introduced to cope with myopia and optimism of human beings. Think about flying to the future, becoming an IFP, imagining the future society, and giving advice to the present from the future. This system works quite well in laboratory and field experiments. It also works well in real cities and towns and several examples are introduced.