Designing Futures That Could Not Be Foreseen
Collective Future-Making in the Deltawerken, 1953–1997
F.T.S. Cascino (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
B.F. van Eekelen – Mentor (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
E.B. Mazerant – Mentor (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
Bert Toussaint – Mentor (Rijkswaterstaat)
Jeroen Gijselhart – Mentor (Rijkswaterstaat)
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Abstract
This thesis investigates how collective future-making works in practice by re-reading the Dutch Deltawerken (1953–1997) through a lens assembled from pragmatist epistemology, practice-based futuring theory, and design and innovation theory. Where the Deltawerken is conventionally narrated as a story of engineering mastery, this thesis reads it for the moments where the capacity at stake was the collective ability to hold a design process open while the brief itself was still forming. This capacity is termed design-ability, distinguished from engineerability as the execution of a settled design within validated practice.
The analysis proceeds chronologically across six phases of the programme, each read through the vocabulary of future-making and through design-theoretic concepts including C-K theory, IDER, path dependence, learning theory, and boundary work. This dual reading yields ten lessons of collective future-making, organised across three capacity domains: perceptive capacity, connective capacity, and generative capacity. The lessons are recomposed into six reflection axes, each structured as a tension between two poles. Four confrontational interviews with Rijkswaterstaat practitioners confirmed that all six tensions are recognised as present and consequential in contemporary practice.
The axes are translated into the Collective Design Compass, a diagnostic instrument that helps programme teams articulate the future their programme is currently enacting and read their situation against the analytical spectra derived from the historical analysis. The thesis contributes a design-theoretic reading of a historical case that reveals conditions for collective future-making invisible from the engineering narrative alone, an empirical demonstration that these conditions remain active in contemporary practice, and a practitioner-facing instrument grounded in both.