Coming of Age in Tomorrow’s World
A speculative inquiry into youth transitions—through the lens of design, futures thinking, and systems analysis.
How will young people navigate identity, relationships, and independence in 2040?
This speculative initiative reimagines “coming of age” not as a singular milestone, but as a dynamic transition shaped by design, data, and systems. It centers on the evolving experiences of youth in a hyperconnected, post-norm world—where traditional thresholds like marriage, employment, and home ownership are fragmented, delayed, or redefined.
The project explores a bold question:
What if companionship itself became an infrastructural service for emotional, cognitive, and relational support?
The Crisis Beneath the Surface
Youth today face existential stress, not just emotional turbulence. We saw this not as a crisis of youth, but as a failure of systems to evolve.
Mental health among youth is deteriorating. Identity is fragmented across virtual and real domains. Relationships are transient. Milestones are obsolete. And yet—expectations persist.
60% of youth aged 18–24 feel unable to cope due to pressure to succeed.
39% of LGBTQ+ youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year.
More than 40% of high schoolers report persistent sadness.
From milestone to multiverse.
From checklist to co-navigation.
When we explore future systems, we often look at elements in isolation-youth, technology, identity. But real change happens in the space between things.
The Borromean rings-a mathematical structure where three rings are interlinked in such a way that removing any one ring causes the other two to fall apart-offer a powerful metaphor. It's not the individual parts that hold the structure, but the relationship between all three. Designing for the future means thinking in these interdependent systems-not as separate parts, but as bound relationships that shape outcomes.
Key insights from our research
Future freedoms feel increasingly threatened for young people.
Youth express deep fears about autonomy, privacy, and freedom in the current political scenario and existing technological surveillance.
The loneliness crisis is leading to social relationships being redefined.
As traditional milestones like marriage and partnership lose their predictability, young people seek more fluid, experimental, and transient forms of connection.
Youth are navigating fluid, multiple, and often conflicting identities.
Shaped by digital life and evolving personal values, young people constantly shift between different versions of themselves-making it harder for them to have confidence in their sense of self.
Youth are overloaded by information but lack trusted guidance.
Constant exposure to fragmented content floods youth with data, but without reliable frameworks to interpret it, decision-making and self-understanding become harder.
Signals and trends
Identifying early shifts and emerging patterns across culture, technology, and society.
Exploring relevant futures
Thinking about purpose and possibility
As designers, we normally build ideas from a needs-driven approach and iterate as we prototype the feasibility, viability and desirability of our outcomes. However, when following an algorithmic design approach, we build ideation seeds considering future possibilities on multiple fronts - creating a design concept that encompasses what will be.
Merging these methods allows us to ask, where are those key gaps we ought to consider? What do those starting points look like?
How does it come together?
Futurity Systems' seed-building approach generates design concepts that are more comprehensive, grounded and connected to our research insights.
Starting points that inform possible future scenarios according to research data, that guide innovation intents and addressed gaps that provide a solid foundation combine to create our initial seed.
Following these steps, multiple idea seeds emerged, from which our research findings supported the choice that became more appealing to our narrative.
How does our seed interact with users in tomorrow’s world? Let’s explore that future together.
Who inhabits tomorrow's world? Exploring perspectives for patch users
A deep dive into future generations
Including paradigm shifts and struggles
Designing for the future means understanding probability - taking into account all research findings and developing a comprehensive panorama.
These are not guesses, they are informed perspectives that current signals, literature, patents, developments and economic infrastructures point towards.
EMERGING REFRAME
As we discovered that our initial statement was limited - reframing the innovation space with new lenses became a key shift.
Redefining
'coming-of-age'
Tackling a more complex, nuanced, and longer transition
CONCEPT
Our concept is rooted in the real journeys of youth - moments of struggle, discovery, and growth that often go unspoken, yet define who they are becoming.
Kitho
noun, singular
kith = old word for friends/family + playful ending "-o"
A Patch-Based Companion for Emotional and Cognitive Navigation
Kitho is a soft, wearable, AI-embedded patch designed to grow alongside its user. It listens, learns, nudges, comforts, and challenges. It’s a kinship system for a world without anchors.
What does it do?
Kitho's capabilities leverage a compilation of all our findings.
How does it work?
Kitho's infrastructure is composed of three main components
Kitho listens, learns, and responds-with context, care, and curiosity.
Designed as a conversational companion attuned to emotional and cognitive context, Kitho adapts its tone, depth, and style to match the user's state and moment.
Whether offering gentle nudges, asking thought-provoking questions, or simply being present, its dialogue draws from a blend of curated data, neural signals, and lived memory.
Worldbuilding in 2040
We imagined a world where:
Patch-based interfaces replace apps and screens
Hybrid zones (home-school-clinic-café) support collective wellbeing
AI companions are as common as backpacks
Identity is modular, relationships are co-constructed, and autonomy is ambient
Speculative design as a tool for policy makers
What new policies, institutions, infrastructure, and support systems must emerge to help youth navigate this reality?
