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Future Me

Designing yourself with speculative design — the methods turned inward.

36 Lessons / Coming soon

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Overview

Future Me turns the methods we normally take into organisations on the person using them.

We spend our working lives helping companies imagine possible futures and then work back to the decisions available today. That process works just as well at the scale of a single life — and most people never apply it to their own, because the tools are locked inside a professional context.

This course walks through knowing yourself as a design input, visualising futures you might actually want, and then closing the loop: the habits, systems, constraints and small deliberate choices that make one of those futures more likely than the others. It draws on the lives and working methods of people who designed themselves on purpose — Buckminster Fuller, Donella Meadows, Octavia Butler, Brian Eno, Cedric Price, Viktor Frankl and others.

It is the most personal course we teach, and the one that needs the least prior knowledge.

Details

36 Lessons / Coming soon

AnytimeVirtual

★★★★★

96% of students rate our courses 5 Stars

100% of our past participants would recommend this course to others. (Seriously, it's true!)

You will leave with

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A way of applying speculative design methods to your own life

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A clearer account of where you actually want to go, and why

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Practice at visualising futures and closing the loop back to today

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Working approaches to habits, systems, minimalism, and serendipity

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A set of lives and methods to think alongside

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Lifetime access to the material

What’s included

Seasonal cohort with peers from around the world
Live tutorials with the SOCD team
1:1 sessions with the founders (J. Paul Neeley + Gemma Jones)

Course Outline

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What & Why _ Everything is now, designing your life, where you want to go, and the no-regrets frame.

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Process _ Know thyself, consider everything, evolutionary basics, visualisation, closing the loop, habits, minimalism, systems, enjoying the journey, serendipity, and the rules of the universe.

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Inspiration _ Working methods drawn from Buckminster Fuller, Charles Darwin, Vera Wang, Stewart Brand, Donella Meadows, Cedric Price, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Sister Corita Kent, Viktor Frankl, Temple Grandin, Octavia Butler, and Ray Kurzweil.

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Conclusion _ Getting started, transforming yourself, and where to take it next.

Course Format

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Self-paced and online. Enrol once and work through the material on your own schedule.

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Lifetime access to the course, including future updates.

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Short lessons designed to be taken one at a time, with exercises you apply to your own work.

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Community forum access alongside other students and the SOCD team.

This course is for

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Anyone at a turning point, or anyone who suspects they are drifting

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Designers who want to turn their own methods inward

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People with no design background at all — this course assumes none

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Anyone who would rather design their life than default into it

Your Teacher

J. Paul Neeley - Speculative Designer & Researcher

J. Paul studied Speculative Design with Dunne & Raby on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art, and has spent the years since applying these methods with organisations from start-ups to multinationals to the United Nations. He founded the School of Critical Design with Gemma Jones in 2017.

For Companies

‍For team licences, multiple seats, or to discuss a bespoke workshop for your organisation, email hello@critical.design.

Want to see how we run this work end to end? Read The Speculative Design Methodology: A Practitioner’s Workflow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Future Me course?

Future Me is a 36-lesson self-paced course from the School of Critical Design that applies speculative design and futures methods to your own life — visualising possible futures for yourself, then closing the loop to the habits, systems, and decisions available today.

Do I need a design background?

No. Future Me is the most accessible course in the school. It uses design and futures methods, but the subject is you, and no prior design training is assumed.

How is this different from ordinary self-help?

It uses the same methods we take into organisations — speculation, systems thinking, backcasting, considering everything — rather than motivational advice. The emphasis is on method and structure, not inspiration.