Ariana Lutterman, MDes

Currently: Carrboro, North Carolina, USA

Ariana is a systemic designer and foresight strategist. She has international experience facilitating foresight workshops, designing community engagements, and conducting research. She has worked in collaboration with UNESCO and the World Futures Studies Federation to help communities move toward desired futures. Her most rewarding moments are helping people with anxious images of the future feel empowered by more hopeful ways forward.

She pursued a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD intent on combining theoretical foresight with applied and practical design work. At OCAD, she met Tara, and was impressed not only by her impeccable minimal wardrobe but her commitment to thinking through how design might be used to facilitate transitions to new ways of living. Ariana collaborated with Tara on their major research project, Designing Futures with Care: Finding Our Ways to Different Worlds Together. The project built on ideas from her undergraduate honours thesis at UNC Chapel Hill about optimistic visions of the future.

Ariana loves her community, both long-distance and local, and is found putting new roots down wherever she is, hosting dinner parties, getting her friends to meet up and run a race in the mountains together, sending doodles and postcards, and just showing up for things. Good at playing the devil’s advocate, Ariana is at home thinking critically about just about anything. She enjoys connecting the dots between her wide variety of interests, generating weird and sometimes good ideas quickly, solving puzzles, and recommending restaurants. She spends a lot of time outside running, hiking, and commuting by bike; reading fiction; and talking to her buds on the phone. She is worried about climate change; she is an optimist; and she still has no idea what job title to call herself.