SELENE TROPIANO

FUTURES DESIGNER & FACILITATOR

shaping futures across design and material culture through foresight and speculative practice.

Services

  • Exploring signals of change to imagine possibilities and design future-ready insights, scenarios, and strategies.

    Horizon Scanning, Trends Research, Insights, Experiential Futures, Speculative narrative, Scenario Planning, Design and Business strategies.

  • With over a decade of experience in the field, I explore fashion as a cultural and systemic lens to reframe its role in society.

    I consult on responsible product design and innovation, collaborating on selected projects that critically rethink design practice and create meaningful, future-conscious products.

    Concept research, Material sourcing, Product innovation and Design Collection.

  • Design and facilitate educational programmes, trainings, and workshops through active and experiential learning across higher education and professional contexts.
    My practice is grounded in inquiry-based methods that create participatory and collaborative spaces to foster long-term vision, creative research and practice, critical thinking, and the development of design knowledge.

How I work

“ KNOW THE PAST, UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT, IMAGINE FUTURES ”

Grounded in design practice and research, my work operates in a hybrid, transdisciplinary space.

I bridge critical imagination with long-term strategy , redesigning existing practices, physical products, and systems while cultivating new ways of thinking for responsible and desirable futures.

Whether in fashion business and education, material culture, or design-driven innovation, I enable futures literacy and present agency.

I thrive in complexity, making sense of emerging signals, anticipating change, and strategically imagining possibilities between the tacit and the tangible.

Shaped by a cross-disciplinary career path, I bring a unique and diverse set of creative, analytical, and strategic tools. My approach is iterative and systemic, blending design, speculative thinking, and foresight to explore what’s next and why it matters today.

Imaginative. Experiential. Provocative. Intentional.

Method

Through a critical and futures lens, I move from observation to activation in an iterative process that turns initial research into insights and design direction shaping futures by acting in the present.

RESEARCH > Scope, Scan, Sense-Making

STEEP+MICH scanning. I use an expanded framework adding Material, Innovation, Creative&Aesthetic, Health & Wellbeing , to understand change, map emerging trends, and frame key questions that inform direction and opportunity, anticipate change, risks and uncertainties.

DESIGN > Scenarios, Speculation, Prototypes

I explore possibilities, preparing for unpredictable futures through concept ideation, experiential futures, or immersive scenarios that make futures tangible.

CREATE > Strategy, Backcasting, Innovation

I translate future visions into purpose-driven strategies, informing decision-making and the development of innovative physical products for transformative outcomes.

Tools

I believe imagination and creativity are essential tools for finding ease within the complexity of our times, embracing uncertainty and preparing for the many possibilities ahead.

Strategy needs imagination as much as imagination needs strategy. Together, they enable futures-resilient and transformative outcomes.

Strategic Imagination is the foundation of my practice: a blend of creative exploration, foresight methodologies, and critical research that shapes my futures-oriented thinking and design approach.

This hybrid and dynamic toolkit evolves continuously, adapting to context and finding expression across corporate and product innovation, NGOs, public discourse, and educational or research environments.

Driven by curiosity, I revisit and expand these tools to stay responsive to change and open to emerging futures.

Check my works

About Me

Hiya!
I’m Selene. I started my career in fashion design, working across products, materials, and collections for over fifteen years, moving between different markets and cultures.

For five years I ran my own label, TROPIANO ; an intimate and formative chapter that earned recognition from Vogue and Pitti Immagine before closing in 2018.

Those years exposed me to the many parallel realities we live in and the countless stories objects carry. What has stayed constant throughout my path is curiosity and love for research. I’ve always been drawn to the cultural layers, subtle signals, and shifting values that sit behind what we create.

That curiosity eventually pulled me beyond fashion and into Futures Studies, where I finally found the language for the questions I had been asking all along.

Today, my work sits at the intersection of design, culture, and foresight. I’m interested in how cultural change unfolds, how we make sense of it, and how imagination can open new ways of thinking, learning and creating.

Since 2014, I’ve also been a tutor , and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, at Istituto Marangoni, where I share my passion and practice with some of the most talented students coming from across the globe.

Contact

Interested in working together?

Have an idea, or just want to say “Hey!” ?

Write me here!