I love design. There are many reasons I’m drawn to this profession, and like many of us in the design business, I carry my own why. For me, one of the reasons is the possibilities. Design is inherently future-focused. It creates something that doesn’t exist — yet. It moves us from the current state, “what it is,” to a future state, “what it could be.” Design is about potential, possibility, and hope. It’s about making things better than we found them. That’s the beauty of design.
This future-centric mindset extends to strategy as well. By definition, strategy is a careful long-term plan or a framework of coordinated activities designed to achieve a specific goal. It is always forward-looking, always future-focused. As a design educator, I feel the same way about education. Every day, as I interact with the next generation of designers, watching their eyes sparkle with curiosity and hope, I’m excited about their potential and all the possibilities they will bring to our industry’s future. As designers, strategists, or educators, we always have our eyes toward the future, thinking one step ahead, forward, upward, and onward. The future lives at the intersection of design, strategy, and education.
Perhaps that’s why I was always drawn to the future. And this future-focused mindset is what led me to becoming one of the inaugural IIDA Certified Design Futurists (CDF). As a future enthusiast, I’d been following the Future Today Institute (FTI) — now Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG) — and futurist Amy Webb’s work for several years. FTSG’s breadth and depth of foresight research had long inspired me. So, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that IIDA partnered with FTSG to create the CDF program tailored specifically for the interior design industry. We have IIDA CEO Cheryl Durst to thank for her bold future vision that made the CDF program possible. IIDA’s commitment to foresight is about equipping today’s designers with the tools to shape what’s next. With this partnership, the future of our industry feels brighter, stronger, and more hopeful.
What drew me most to the CDF program was the strategic foresight methodology. Strategic foresight is a data-driven practice for developing multiple plausible scenarios to inform long-term planning. Being a futurist isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about preparing for it and making better, future-informed decisions. It’s not about looking into a crystal ball and hoping for the best. It’s about spotting signals and trends, examining uncertainties, and building multiple potential future scenarios grounded in research, data, and strategy. The CDF program opened my eyes to how complex and comprehensive the foresight process is. It demands you to think wide, think deep, and think far ahead, constantly diverging and converging through the forecasting funnel to form future insights. It requires curiosity, exploration, systems thinking, and the ability to synthesize patterns across seemingly unrelated dots. Out of that process, bright spots emerge, enabling you to connect the dots and envision future possibilities.
The Strategic Foresight methodology begins with scoping a foresight project. With the future topic in mind, you research eleven macro sources of change: environment, economy, infrastructure, demographics, health, education, governments, media, wealth distribution, geopolitics, and, of course, technology as the underlying driver. From there, you build a project sketch, gather signals and uncertainties, and identify thematic elements and emerging trends. For design futurists, this also includes exploring visual languages. Using foresight frameworks like CIPHER and MOVE, the process leads you through opportunities, threats, and scenario-writing to arrive at multiple plausible future user and product experience scenarios. And that was one of my favorite aspects: the storytelling. After all the rigorous analysis, foresight translates into narratives, crafted stories of possible futures. The process stretched both sides of my brain, analytical and creative.
After becoming a Certified Design Futurist, I feel as though I gained not just new knowledge but a whole new way of thinking. Admittedly, the program was no small task. It was rigorous, intensive, and at times challenging. But it was also stimulating, inspiring, and transformative, and it stretched my brain in the best way possible. Now I find myself constantly scanning for signals, spotting trends, and connecting the dots to imagine how they might shape tomorrow. For designers, strategic foresight is more than an academic exercise. I believe it could be our superpower, expanding the designer’s toolbox and equipping us to make design decisions informed not only by imagination and aesthetics, but also by research, data, and strategy. It helps us envision futures that are resilient, innovative, and grounded in human needs. As designers, we hold responsibility for shaping the collective future of our communities. What better way to prepare than to equip ourselves with futurist thinking? This is what the CDF program taught me, and why I believe our industry would benefit from embracing it.
Interview with Mark Bryan on CDF
To understand the CDF program fully, it would be beneficial to hear from the expert who helped bring it to life. Mark Bryan, Senior Foresight Manager at FTSG and IIDA Futurist-in-Residence, is the one who translated FTSG’s strategic foresight methods into a program uniquely tailored for our industry. Mark spoke with me about the why and the how behind this initiative.
When asked why strategic foresight matters to design, Mark Bryan made it clear: “Strategic foresight is a data-driven methodology that allows us to explore multiple different ways that the future could evolve.” It’s not about predicting, he emphasized, but preparing — helping designers anticipate change, build adaptability, and design a better future world. The genesis of the CDF course was “to help people think in a more meaningful manner about what the future could bring and how we could augment what design already does really well, which is impacting human behavior and creating new types of connections and communities.”
That preparation is especially critical because, as Bryan pointed out, “we’re creating environments that are meant to last 20–30 years.” Buildings and interiors must be resilient and flexible enough to adapt to shifting needs, technologies, and communities. Clients are also looking for spaces that can pivot over time, and foresight equips designers with the tools to respond.
According to Bryan, one of the biggest gaps foresight helps fill is the ability to convey lived experience. Traditional design processes, such as plans and renderings, can show what a project will look like, but not how it will feel years into the future. “What is it going to be like when people move in there? How are they going to change? What new types of behaviors will evolve?” Foresight enables designers to create richer, data-backed narratives for what that future could bring for the people who will inhabit the spaces we design.
Foresight also offers a way forward as the industry evolves. There are potential risks, Bryan noted, of design industry being commoditized. But through foresight, designers can reimagine their value and expand their roles. “I think identifying the white spaces and gaps of what we could be offering the world that nobody’s considered yet is one of the biggest value propositions of foresight. One of the powerful things foresight offers to designers is the way to think differently. It offers a way to explore other aspects of our world that we might not consider normally, but that will have tremendous impact.”
The CDF course is designed to create more innovative processes, projects, and products, augmenting our current design process. Each step of the design phase can be enriched by foresight frameworks that help designers go deeper, think more expansively, and tackle the uncertainties. “Foresight helps us prepare for unknowns like the future of work, not just the future of the workplace.”
I asked Bryan how foresight differs from design thinking process, as they both have divergence, convergence, and synthesis process. He acknowledged similarities but emphasized that foresight is more future-oriented. “Design thinking is about solving today’s problems. What foresight does is not only look at today’s problems, but tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities, and then design around that.”
We also discussed the difference between trend and trendy. Many designers hear the word “trend” and think of colors or styles that come and go. Bryan clarified that foresight defines a trend as “what we can know about the future today, that truly will have a long-term impact.” Unlike short-lived trendy styles, true trends are long-term forces observed across multiple sources, like the impact of color psychology rather than a passing trendy color. Understanding that distinction helps designers move beyond what’s fashionable toward what’s meaningful.
As an educator myself, I was especially interested in his perspective on how foresight can inform design education. Bryan stressed that it’s not just about teaching students the tools, but also preparing educators to anticipate change. He envisions foresight helping educators identify shifts and bring them into the classroom, while giving students the tools to scan for signals, question assumptions, and imagine new possibilities.
His final advice for designers at every stage is simple but powerful: “Don’t forget to ask what if.” These questions can lead to deeper, more transformative future-focused work. “Ask what if designs could be truly responsive to people in an emotionally sensitive kind of way. If you ask what if first, it sets a better foundation for the entire design story that you’re going to be creating.” That is the real promise of foresight: helping designers move from imagining spaces that just look good to creating futures that truly matter.
Closing Thoughts
Going through the CDF program myself, and then hearing directly from Mark Bryan, reinforced one truth: design is always about the future. But with foresight, we can move from simply imagining it to actively preparing for it. The program sharpened my lens as a designer, strategist, and educator, and it deepened my belief that the interior design industry must embrace this mindset, and designers should think like futurists.
Because if design is about possibility, then design futures are about responsibility. Responsibility to our clients, our communities, and our collective future.
And that’s a future worth preparing for.