Final Year Product Design Student, Mitchell Allen shares their experience working towards the 2026 ARC exhibition titled Designing Future Experiences: Equitable Communities of Health in the Climate Era. This was an exhibition of two futures-focused courses undertaken at SIT, in partnership with the University of Glasgow's Advanced Research Centre and the Satellite Applications Catapult organisation. These two courses explore equitable health and ecologies of intelligence through the design of speculative future worlds and communities which envisage new personal, population, public, and planetary experiences in the future.

Our recent exhibition at the ARC marked the culmination of a project centred on equitable health through speculative future worlds. Working in one of eight groups, we were tasked with envisioning life ten years from now, grounding our ideas in research from past and present contexts. My group focused on civic personal health, exploring how evolving data systems could increasingly shape political decision-making, and how this shift might demand a more reciprocal sense of responsibility within communities.

By the exhibition stage, our speculative world had developed its own internal logic. Policies, behaviours, and systems were no longer abstract ideas but interconnected elements of a functioning civic environment. The challenge became communicating that complexity without oversimplifying it.

Presenting the work within a professional setting sharpened that responsibility. The environment required conceptual and visual clarity. We had to ensure that visitors could understand the tensions within our world: the benefits of data-informed governance alongside the ethical and communal implications it introduced.

The exhibition ultimately became a moment of articulation. It allowed us to express the depth of our research and position our future world as a considered proposition rather than a distant speculation.

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