Refracting Megatrends into Design Education
Megatrends PRISM Workshop for IED Spain
A collaborative foresight session bringing academic and management teams together to connect global change to IED’s future direction, and translate big shifts into concrete implications, questions, and next steps
Challenge
In October 2025, we hosted academic and management teams across IED in Spain to explore how global change is reshaping education, creativity, and the role of design schools. The ambition was use trends as a shared foundation for strategic and academic planning toward 2029 and beyond, with clarity on what matters, where tensions are rising, and what opportunities IED could shape rather than react to.
IED is used to staying ahead of the curve. Yet the forces shaping the coming years are moving faster, converging in unexpected ways, and creating opportunities and risks at the same time, from AI transforming creative practice and learning, to shifting identities, wellbeing pressures, and new expectations of institutions. This workshop was designed to help teams zoom out together, align on a shared language, and connect global shifts directly to IED’s choices.
Approach
We designed a half-day online session using ANTICIPATE’s 8 Megatrends, reframed for the realities of design, creativity, and education, and applied through the Megatrends PRISM, a facilitation tool that turns high-level change into actionable insight through five lenses: Possibilities, Risks, Inquiries, Signals, and Mindsets.
The workshop structure combined shared framing with structured group exploration:
Welcome & Futures Framing: A futures thinking introduction and a shared guiding question around which global forces and signals will most shape IED’s future, and what that could mean for academic priorities.
Megatrend Briefings: An accessible walkthrough of the 8 Megatrends (from Emerging World Order to Artificial Revolution), supported by concrete examples and signals to make change tangible.
Group work with PRISM: Teams worked hands-on with selected megatrends, mapping opportunities, threats, key questions, early signals, and the internal mindsets that may need to evolve.
Collective synthesis: Groups shared highlights, surfaced cross-trend tensions, and consolidated what stood out as most relevant for IED’s next phase.
Outcomes
1) A clear, shared map of what’s shifting
The workshop created a shared overview of the megatrends most likely to influence IED, and, importantly, how participants interpreted their implications across education, creativity, and institutional identity.
2) PRISM insights across the 8 Megatrends
Across the PRISM lenses, participants identified concrete opportunity spaces (e.g., new hybrid learning formats, “cities as living classrooms,” positioning IED as a safe and plural space), key risks (e.g., barriers to mobility, exclusion through inequality, trust erosion in synthetic media), and a set of questions to carry forward (e.g., what “impact” means when it involves local lives; what it takes to humanise technology in learning; how to teach in a world of multiple identities)
3) Four strategic clusters to guide next steps
To make the output easier to act on, the debrief synthesised the session into four clusters, each with actionable tensions, ideas to explore or prototype, and a picture of what “success in 2030” could look like:
Glocal Futures (Emerging World Order & Wealth Polarization)
Learning Futures (Optimising Health & Artificial Revolution)
Cultural Futures (Liquid Lifestyles & Blurring Realities)
Sustainable Futures (Urban Transformation & Collapsing Ecosystems)
4) A direction-of-travel: toward a “truly human school”
One of the strongest cross-cutting reflections was a shared aspiration to make IED “truly human”, in how it teaches, works, and connects. Participants expressed a desire to approach technology and AI intentionally and critically, and to treat governance, relationships, and participation as strategic questions, not just operational ones. IED’s potential role as a bridge-builder, across disciplines, cultures, and generations, emerged as a credible and motivating direction
Testimonial
(On its way)
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