The Lost Futures Club

The objective of this Professional Doctorate is to build and test a collective infrastructure that addresses the constrained agency experienced by early-career critical designers. To do this, it establishes The Lost Futures Club, a small collective of early and mid-career designers (including myself) navigating the gap between their educational values and the demands of professional life. The Club is conceived as a “third space” between academia and the market, providing a base for sustained critical practice.
The Club’s methodology is Reconstrained Design. This approach begins by identifying the oblique constraints that implicitly shape design outcomes, such as the assumption that all projects must be scalable or profitable. It then deliberately replaces these with new, value-based constraints. For example, a commitment to local scale or non-extractive economics. The objective is not to design without constraints, but to design with different constraints, making it possible to develop viable alternatives to mainstream practice.
This research applies the method in two ways: first, to the Club’s creative work (practicing reconstrained design), and second, to the Club’s own operational infrastructure (reconstraining design practice). The creative work involves excavating “lost futures”, abandoned social and technological possibilities, and reimagining them as functional prototypes for alternative presents. This focus builds skills, fosters collaboration, and produces tangible outputs that directly challenge the capitalist realist claim that “there is no alternative”.
The second application is where the primary research objective lies: the Club’s own legal form, governance, and economic model become a product of the same reconstrained process. This transforms the research into an auto-ethnographic experiment, where the organizational development itself is both the intervention and the object of study.