Expand: Stretching the Future By Design

Today, it can seem as if the world has nothing but problems.

And more than ever the boundaries of those problems are expanding in terms of the speed, scale, and impact by which they can alter business conditions, public governance, entire societies, the health of our planet, and the quality of our lives.

Meeting these growing challenges requires ambitious new ways of designing solutions.

With Expand: Stretching the Future By Design, authors Jens Martin Skibsted, a multiple-award winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher, and Christian Bason, political scientist and CEO of the Danish Design Centre, take readers beyond “design thinking” to challenge current habits and carve out new space for more sustainable innovation.

From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas—time, proximity, value, life, dimensions, and sectors—can provide radical, useful solutions to a whole host of current problems around the globe.

With powerful real-world examples, the book challenges our freewheeling belief in technological determinism and its insensitivity toward ethics, humanity, and the environment.

Expand is the first book to not just critique design thinking, but welcome it as a starting point for an ambitious, wide-ranging tale of how to expand and think beyond it.

The best way to predict the future is to design it. Expand is the book that shows us how.