This short paper gathers insight about learning environments in design and leadership in the creative industries. The production of expertise is often highly specialised and domain specific, however this study observes a learning situation that places emphasis on collaborative interaction and group dynamics nested within dense creative networks. Design learning demands complex problem solving and decision making in response to contingent situations. These environments defy brevity of explanation, yet are microcosms of radical transformations in the digital economy. The reciprocal relationship between learning environments and industry are explored. Embedding in a network of learners and experts, using ethnographic methods blend situated insight with theoretical oversight. An ethnographic investigation of a learning organisation is applied to generate insight that reveals a dense network of collaborative practices, the production of experts and complex reciprocal relationships between learning and professional practice. Intense and inevitably participatory ethnographic engagements are indicative the processes of transformative change and challenge our understanding of the nature of learning. The role of innovation and flux in societal structures is reflected in these radically different approaches to learning. The image that appears is highly counterintuitive but prescient, providing foundations of new approaches to design education at the boundary. Learning environments that are responsive to a world that is rapidly moving beyond a stable state.

This paper is an output of a two day 'Festival Lab' held at the Future Everything Festival, Manchester, UK, March 2015. The Festival Lab invited a team of academic researchers to develop a model of public engagement during the festival that would explore specific research questions around mobility, data awareness, and civic engagement. From this brief the academic team developed the Festival Lab 'PuBLiC', and created an activity arc that involved participants borrowing bicycles and responding to structured and unstructured research questions about the future of cycling and data use in the city of Manchester. Equipped with iPhones with bespoke software for collecting short textual comments, photographs and GPS data, participants became integral actors in one-day field studies, taking the role of both subjects and authors of this paper. We present findings and observations noted by participants and researchers, discussing the significance of these as triangulated in a closing workshop plenary session. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the paper creation process itself, a collaborative, intensive, fast-paced approach that challenges the very framework of academic authority and public engagement.

Transmuting the entanglement of situations, contexts, artifacts and people, designers mediate the relationship between ‘what could be’ and ‘what is’. All design, then, has an implicit relationship with the future. Latency will always exist as part of this relationship, between the inception of a design concept, development and delivery of that concept, and the manifestation of that concept's potential impact on the world. As we move further into the heart of the Digital Revolution these periods of latency decrease, whilst the breadth and depth of potential impacts increase. Always an arm's length away, but with a velocity and mass greater than at any point in history, the momentum of the future today is greater than ever before. This paper describes the practicalities of operationalizing design fiction, using anticipatory ethnography, in order to illuminate and explore the implications of plausible near futures and in doing so allowing designers and their designs to match the velocity of the future before critical impacts occur. By harnessing designers' speculation can we make the future's ‘what is’ better than simply ‘what could be’?

This paper aims to foreground issues for design ethnographers working in urban contexts within the smart-city discourse. It highlights ethnography's role in a shared urban future by exploring how ethnographers might pave the way for envisioning digital infrastructure at the core of Smart City programs. This paper begins by asking whether urban development practitioners can design for inclusive interaction with Smart Urban Infrastructure. The research suggests how ethnographers can work with ‘cities’ to rapidly develop diagnostic tools and capture insights that inform design processes with both utility and inclusive interaction as their key values. This involves rethinking how we consider places where space and information intersect. This work led to developing rapid means to assay a site and sensitize to contextual issues by tapping into heuristic expertise innate in city dwellers. This means doing ethnography in parallel with publics as opposed to performing ethnography ‘on’ them. Hence we discuss a fresh ethnographic perspective that can be especially useful in this context; shared ethnography.

This video - A Machine. Learning - adopts a 'research through design' approach [4] to producing a design fiction prototype [2,7]. By using a research through design approach that is grounded in the practical experience of creating a design fiction we contribute practical insights about the process of creating a design fiction for HCI. Reflecting on the production of the video we explore challenges and opportunities presented by the design fiction method when it is applied to near-future HCI scenarios. The video depicts the story of Manu and his new artificially intelligent portable device. In the paper we consider the video, using it as a means to contrast design fiction with other approaches to prototyping; we describe the story, content and style of the video; finally we reflect on the production of the video (writing, filming and editing processes) in order to offer practical insights to the HCI community, with regards to prototyping using design fiction and film.

Here we consider design ethnography, and design fiction. We cast these two approaches, and the design endeavor itself, as forward‐looking processes. Exploring the means by which design ethnography and design fiction derive their value reveals the potential for a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Our thesis argues that design ethnography can provide design fiction with the methods required to operationalize the practice in industry contexts. Meanwhile design fiction can provide design ethnographers a novel way of extending the temporal scope of the practice, thus deriving actionable insights that are applicable further into the future.