This research project studies the intersection of design and futures to uncover how both practices amplify each other’s potential to facilitate difficult conversations. This project is part horizonscan of current design and futures practices to better understand the professional landscape and part evocative autoethnographic study of my personal design practices throughout the last decade to evaluate a series of tools and frameworks could be useful to both fields by selecting those that intuitively made sense . Through my immersion into the field of futures and foresight as a professional designer, I wanted to first understand how designers and futurists are adopting each other’s practices and at what level of maturity they are at with the adoption and integration of the shared knowledge. Both practices have similar goals, adoption barriers, and areas for malpractice. At the intersection of design and futures both disciplines seem diluted. On one side designers have little understanding of futures studies but great creative capacity to do design and run ethnographic research with humans. On the other side, futurists that have adopted design practices lack the rigorous understanding of design and the complexity of the process, and they therefore run shallow design sprints with unknown outcomes. Many futurists use design as a medium of delivery for experiential futures and scenarios that they have built when they could be leveraging design’s ability to find problems/solutions, unearthing deep human insight from personas of the futures, and using scenarios as the starting point to understand problems and constraints that may emerge in the futures by mapping out context specific futures.