Space and Knowledge 2040

Method
This study integrated Schultz's classic incasting with Mitroff and Emshoff’s reverse assumptive analysis through 330 horizon scans, 18 expert interviews, analysis of 117 sources, and 6 workshop participants. 

Goal
Build a world that reflects today's worldviews about access to knowledge and design a strategy to fix the problem.

Provocation
What If Knowledge Access Were a Crime by Class?

The Challenge
By 2040, the spaces we design will help determine who can learn, gather, and share. In this study, we explored how spatial design can broaden access to knowledge rather than limit it. 

Pain Point
Designers tend to respond to control pressures after the fact rather than anticipating them, and many spaces now limit access through smart-building control systems and surveillance-based safety infrastructure. Cultural artifacts, languages, and community knowledge face the risk of loss, while uneven access widens class divides. Without a forward-looking method, designers may build the same systems of restriction. 

The Solution
We examined how access to knowledge could change across four domains: social, technical, educational, and cultural. We applied the four quadrants of futuring, along with inversion thinking, extrapolation, and speculation, to produce six futures, grouped into three scenarios: "The Collapse,, Spaces that Restrict," "The Rise," Spaces of Possibilities," and "The New Equilibrium, Spaces Used to Empower." The workshop design gave participants a way to test how design choices either restrict or increase access to knowledge. 

The Impact
The workshop gave participants a clear vocabulary for the choices present in each design decision, such as whether a space restricts or increases power and whether it widens or narrows divides. The most useful directions included shifting away from fear- and surveillance-based approaches, reconsidering technology-centered learning, and reinforcing the community structures on which knowledge sharing depends. The central insight was that unrestricted spaces can carry as much risk as over-restricted ones, so effective design balances both. 

Value Delivered
The study produced a design lens for knowledge democracy: spaces that distribute power, reduce class divides, and protect the freedom to learn. In practice, this means places where people can gather and share, settings that support connection, and environments that improve how knowledge moves through a community. The workshop design gave stakeholders a structured, repeatable way to make informed decisions about the future of knowledge access.