Designing for the future has an allure - why design for the way things are now when we can be bold, experiment with, and paint pictures of worlds just on the verge of becoming? There's a thrill to making something new, probing the edges of possibility by asking not "How might we?" but "What might be?". So, why is this important? The things we work with are more fluid, more interconnected, and more continuously in flux than ever before. The purpose of technologies is only figured out after they've been made and released: mobile phones are only useful for the ecosystem of services and interactions that spring up around them; the capabilities of new AI systems are only discovered through investigation, often in public, as communities experiment to see what's possible - "does it do this?". At the same time, we can recognise that the value of design is not only in making better systems but in investigating the possible worlds that might be made. This is what Pierce would call 'frictional' design: accelerating current trends, exploring counterfactuals, creating space to imagine how the world might be different, and shaping the direction of travel.

A subtle shift here is thinking about “relations not functions”: designing not what things do, but what they come to mean, the ways that they affect the people that use them, or mediate relations between people. We can think of relations of power, or visibility, or care - but there are many more, and the projects shown here showcase different approaches to the relations around digital systems.

Firstly, some of the projects look at ways to mediate and change existing relations.

Road Echoes shows us how to keep the relationality of past travels alive - it's not about the distance covered, it's about what happened along the way, and how technology helps to build that web of relation to places, music and people. Transient Recorder changes our relation with time and spaces, asking what happens when spaces start to remember all of the sounds that happen in them - how does this affect our behaviour, our conversation, our humanity? Claude your cloud at home and Sensecab physicalise relations, the first is about waste streams from care procedures, and the second makes our ownership relations to personal and shared data tangible. Entangled Futures looks at ways of bringing contestation into healthcare - a way to push back on power relations and find more personal decisions.

Some projects change the way we relate to making and designing things. SoundSnip opens up the possibilities for music making, disrupting the hierarchy of who can play, flattening the learning curve. The Artificial Intelligence Discovery Toolkit changes who can create and engage with AI systems, embodying an easy, tangible process that allows children to experiment with Generative AI. Made by Humans works at a higher level, setting out to interrogate what it means to create in a world full of GenAI systems. And, Prompting Realities shifts the role of digital system creators away from programming behaviour towards describing the way the system is, and letting others describe - in a conversational way - what they would like it to do.

Lastly, some projects look at the new relations that arise as systems become more intelligent. Understanding AVs takes a 'more than human' lens, asking people to play the role of autonomous vehicles to explore the choreographies and possibilities they offer. Kintting the Sea Slugs picks up the idea of collaborative assemblages of humans, AI and machines and explores what they might feel like. Finally, the Absurdist Chatbots take a pataphysical approach to understanding trust between humans and AI systems, using surreal humour, challenging us to be critical about the ways we relate.

It's a bonanza of possibilities! If there's one thing we're seeing from the emerging technologies at the moment, it's that we can move rapidly to explore potential futures. In a world where GenAI can turn a scribble into a 3d model, a doodle into a functioning website, what is the role of design? As these projects highlight, it's about finding what is human and resonant in the flow of technology, of exploring futures before they come to pass, and worrying less about what things do than about how we relate to them.