Creativity & Futures
Creative Foresight for Public and Social Impact
Unlock your creativity and explore future possibilities through inclusive storytelling and speculative inquiry in this one-day masterclass on designing the future.
Creativity & Futures
Creative Foresight for Public and Social Impact
Unlock your creativity and explore future possibilities through inclusive storytelling and speculative inquiry in this one-day masterclass on designing the future.
Governments, social impact organisations and communities are increasingly faced with futures that are uncertain, complex and rapidly changing. While strategic foresight helps us understand emerging trends and possible futures, many leaders struggle to move from anticipating change to imagining new possibilities, generating impactful insights, and designing meaningful responses. This highly interactive one-day masterclass introduces participants to unlock your creativity with future possibilities through developing human stories and speculation design of the future.
Upcoming sessions
Run 1
3 July, 2026
9.30am – 5.30pm SGT
Venue: In-person, Singapore, location details to follow.
Run 2
13 August, 2026
9.30am – 5.30pm SGT
Venue: In-person, Singapore, location details to follow.
SGD 650 per participant (excluding 9% GST)
Interested in bringing this workshop to your country? Please contact us at info@thinkplace.com.sg.
Who is this programme for and what will you learn
Designed for public servants, policymakers, social innovators, community leaders, NGOs, foundations, researchers, service designers, strategists and anyone interested in designing more inclusive and human-centred futures.
Learning Outcomes
Learn how to create future archetypes and future life profiles, uncover emerging vulnerabilities, aspirations and human needs.
Apply the ThinkPlace Creative Speculation Canvas™ to challenge assumptions and generate opportunities for policy, service and social innovation.
Create design fictions and future stories that will bring about desirable, equitable and human-centred futures to life.
Segment 1
From Understanding Futures to Creating Futures
Participants explore why traditional approaches to planning and innovation often struggle in times of uncertainty and complexity. They will learn the differences between strategic foresight and creative foresight, and how creative foresight complements existing futures methods by helping leaders imagine, experience and shape possible futures.
Segment 2
Future Archetypes & Profiles
Rather than focusing on today's users and stakeholders, participants will learn how to create future archetypes and future life profiles that bring future citizens, communities and stakeholders to life. Participants will explore how emerging societal, technological and environmental shifts may influence people's identities, vulnerabilities, aspirations, paradoxes and evolving human needs. By developing rich future profiles, participants will gain a deeper understanding of how future conditions may shape everyday lives and experiences.
Segment 3
The ThinkPlace Creative Speculation Canvas™
Participants will be introduced to the ThinkPlace Creative Speculation Canvas™, a practical framework for stretching imagination and exploring future possibilities. Using a series of speculation lenses, participants will learn how to challenge assumptions, uncover hidden opportunities, and surface future questions that may not emerge through traditional planning approaches. The session emphasises curiosity and possibility rather than prediction.
Segment 4
Future Narrative and Artefacts
Rather than creating abstract scenarios, participants will develop a future ecosystem that enables them to experience how policies, services and societal changes may be understood, adopted, challenged or embraced by different stakeholders. Participants will be learn how to bring future possibilities to life through narratives, artefacts, democratic conversations and social discourse.
Programme outline
Meet your trainer
Regional Director,
ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia
Dr. Debbie Ng
Dr. Debbie Ng, PhD, is a distinguished design leader with over 18 years of experience driving transformative change across complex public and social challenges through human-centred design. As Regional Director of ThinkPlace Singapore and Asia, she collaborates with organisations across sectors to shape innovative, sustainable futures, leveraging design as a powerful force for social good. Debbie is a pioneer of the design thinking initiative in Singapore in 2007, and continued to serve under various capacities in the Public Service Division of the Prime Minister's Office, SPRING Singapore and Singapore Polytechnic.
Debbie excels in navigating intricate, multi-dimensional problems where solutions are ambiguous, applying her expertise in design leadership, complex systems thinking, ethnography, co-design, and service design.
Fueled by a deep commitment to empowering others, Debbie dedicates herself to building internal change and transformation teams and coaching leaders to be empathetic, creative and adaptive leaders.