Reimagining sustainable mobility Futures: exploring design imaginariums for city-wide challenges

This exploratory paper presents an approach known as 'Design Imaginariums,' pop-up spaces based on speculative design principles and community driven creative problem-solving to address systemic city-wide challenges. Drawing inspiration and insights from a one-day design sprint and a real-world prototype that focused on mobility urban futures, these pop-up spaces serve as platforms to actively involve citizens in the design process, prompting responsive ideas and recommendations from city stakeholders. The paper begins by discussing the background and motivations to initiate the research, elaborating on the City of Dundee’s aspirations for creating ecologically vibrant and socially inclusive urban spaces. It then outlines the research protocol and explores how Design Imaginariums can harness speculative thinking and community engagement to reimagine sustainable mobility. Finally, it discusses the capacity of imaginative scenarios to inform and influence policymaking and transformative change, emphasizing how Design Imaginariums might have something useful to offer the wider design research community.