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Food&Future is a speculative design project built in collaboration with the Visualization Centre in Norrköping. I designed NourishNext - an interactive, web-based "future food grocery store" set in 2050, to give people a tangible, browsable window into where food might be headed: lab-grown meat, insect protein, mycoprotein, 3D-printed food, and edible packaging, all presented as everyday products on a shelf.

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Rather than guessing at this future myself, I ran a series of participatory workshops where people imagined their own 2050 food worlds, and used what came out of those sessions to shape the store's world, characters, and content. The idea was simple: put people inside a plausible future, and see what it makes them think about the choices they're making today.

Design question: How can a future food scenario spark reflection on current food practices through a speculative digital artifact?

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Our food system is in trouble. It's responsible for roughly a quarter of global CO2 emissions and most of the world's land use, and it's a leading driver of biodiversity loss. At the same time, everyday eating habits built around convenience are fueling poor nutrition and food insecurity.

New "future foods" are being pitched as part of the fix, but it's an open question whether people will actually want them, trust them, or change their habits because of them. This project wasn't about betting on one solution, it was about understanding how people react when they're confronted with these alternatives, and whether putting them in front of people in an imaginative, tangible way could shift how they think about food today.

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I grounded the project in a set of frameworks that shaped both the workshops and the final design:

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• Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB) - the main lens for the project. DfSB looks at how design choices can nudge people's habits and attitudes, working across the Theory of Planned Behaviour (attitudes, social norms, perceived control) and the Power in Decision-Making model (softer "motivating" moves like enlightening and spurring vs. harder "directing" moves like steering and forcing). This became my framework for deciding how NourishNext should try to influence people and how it could go further.

• The Cone of Futures (Dunne & Raby / Voros) - helped me decide what kind of future to design for. I deliberately aimed for a plausible, preferable future rather than a utopia or dystopia, so the store would feel grounded and relatable rather than like sci-fi.

• Design Fiction - the core creative approach: building believable, "lived-in" prototypes from a near future to spark conversation, rather than just illustrating concepts.

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I used two frameworks to move from research to a finished prototype:

• The Double Diamond of Speculative Design (Colosi, 2017) -  merges the classic double-diamond process with a scenario space and an artifact space. I moved through signal-scanning and research, into defining a plausible 2050 scenario, then into developing and building the actual NourishNext prototype.

• The Diegetic Workshop Framework - a framework I created myself as part of this project, and its core original contribution. It structures a workshop around three moves: Situated Meaning (surfacing people's emotions, memories, and cultural associations with food today), Values (what people actually care about trust, security, connection, and more personal values), and Futurescaping (building the future world top-down first the bigger environment, then the everyday lifestyles inside it).

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Storyboarding with workshop participants

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I ran this as a three-part workshop series - photo elicitation, storyboarding, and character building and used what came out of it to directly shape NourishNext's content, world, and characters. I then translated sketches into wireframes and built out the site, and user-tested it for feedback.

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• NourishNext worked well as a reflective, "enlightening" tool  most people who tested it said it shifted how they thought about food but reflection isn't the same as changed behaviour. It nudges thinking; it doesn't yet drive action.

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• Looking at it through the three design stances (directing / enabling / co-prototyping), the project landed closest to enabling and co-prototyping people helped shape what went into it. Next steps would be to lean further into physical, sensory experiences (even AR/VR) to make that engagement feel less like browsing a website and more like actually being in the future.

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• Of the behaviour-change strategies available, I only really used enlightening within this scope. There's real potential to add spurring (reward-based feedback for good choices) and forcing (showing negative future consequences as friction) to push the artifact from "gets people thinking" to "gets people acting."

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• Social norms were the hardest piece to design for food culture varies hugely by region, so a single artifact can't really capture what's "socially acceptable" everywhere. A real-world version of this would need to be built much more locally and culturally specific.

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• A big takeaway: practice theory designing for what people do, not just what they think, might actually be a stronger approach than DfSB for a project like this, since DfSB works mostly at the level of attitude and reflection. That's a clear direction for where I'd take this next.

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• More broadly, the workshops were genuinely effective at getting people talking about tech vs. authenticity in food, the social and economic tension around new food products, and real uncertainty about future foods. The main lesson: speculative work only stays useful if it keeps looping back to present-day, believable concerns, otherwise it drifts into fantasy and loses its power to actually change how people see today's choices.

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Full methodology, workshop findings, and prototype walkthrough covered in the presentation above.

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Click HERE to view my Master's Thesis