Design for Adaptation

We help you understand what’s coming and what to do about it. By enhancing strategic planning with creative speculation, we empower you with the information, vision, and action you need to transform future uncertainty into present day choice. With decades of experience in urban development, resilience and infrastructure, we help you embrace disruption and design for adaption. With the speed, scope and scales of change accelerating, the past is no longer a sufficient template for how to navigate the future. Shaping the futures we want depends on valuing our dreams and desires as serious inspiration, imagining what could be and developing actionable strategies to get there. We combine two practice areas that are typically siloed -- speculative futures and strategic planning. Together, they provide the information, vision, creative thinking and actionable strategies we need to face and build our preferred futures. Speculative futures provide frameworks for exploring, prototyping, testing and refining steps to achieve the futures we want. Based in creativity, empathy and iteration, speculative futures help build alignment among people from diverse backgrounds and turn ideas into action. We link these creative tools with a forensic approach to strategic planning, grounding key decisions in tactical, quantitative research. Strategic planning allow us to identify the policy shifts, infrastructure projects, and migration patterns that eventually create conditions that make disaster inevitable. We look at factors like population density, emergency preparedness, climate change, demographic shifts and social psychology to understand what’s likely, and when.