Future Footprint: A Future Signal-Driven Design Ideation Tool

The processes of design thinking usually begin with the divergence of thinking to seek inspiration and opportunity points. For the designers, they focus on the design theme, combine their existing experience, and capture creative signals through data collection, brainstorming, and other design methods. Traditional design tools rarely adapt to the multiplicity and uncertainty of design objects as they move into the long-term future. There arises a need in the teaching of design, that is to accurately identify opportunities for innovation amid a multitude of potential signals. And guide designers to reply the uncertain future, conceive the future in different ways, stimulate their implicit memory to generate design ideas from the inside out, and further influence their current choices and actions. To meet this challenge, this study proposes a design thinking tool that inspire future thinking: Future Footprint (FF). Which can assist users envision the future of products and services through the integration of design and futurology tools. Based on the signal-oriented preliminary data, broaden the thinking of users through the way of path thinking. Inspire users to generate breakthrough creative ideas driven by technology and social humanity, and produce the conception of the future. This tool has been applied in the research and teaching of the course “Product and Service Design” to guide students to propose design ideas. The specific use methods and results of the tool will be further described in this paper.