“Designing for today requires attention. Designing for tomorrow requires intention. We need both.”
Hannah Oh is a design strategist who navigates both the immediacy of today’s culture and the uncertainty of tomorrow. With a career that spans fashion, service design, and strategic foresight, Hannah’s work is driven to design well, we must understand both what is happening now — and what could happen next.
Currently based in Boston and working at the independent strategy studio Other Tomorrows, Hannah designs products, services, and experiences that are both culturally relevant and strategically forward-looking. Her approach blends real-time cultural insight with structured future-thinking — helping clients respond to the present while preparing for what’s ahead.
Designing for Today: Culture and Trends as Compass
Before stepping into strategic roles, Hannah began her career in fashion at MCM, a global luxury brand based in Germany. There, she led trend research, color development, and product design — work that required sensitivity to shifting cultural cues, aesthetic movements, and consumer behaviors. These early experiences shaped her instinct for spotting meaningful patterns in culture, an instinct she continues to apply today.
Hannah remains deeply connected to contemporary trends, from emerging technologies to internet culture. She sees platforms like TikTok not just as distractions, but as rich environments where aesthetics evolve, language shifts, and new needs emerge. In her view, designing for the present means staying curious, observant, and immersed — not just in design publications, but in the cultural signals people are actually responding to.
Designing for Tomorrow: The Backcasting Model
While many design processes try to predict the future by extending today’s trends, Hannah works differently. At Other Tomorrows, she uses the backcasting model — a method that starts with a clear vision of the ideal future (typically 3-5 years ahead) and then works backwards to identify what needs to be in place to get there.
Image source: Other Tomorrows
Unlike forecasting, which can reinforce existing trajectories, backcasting invites strategic imagination. It’s particularly effective when working toward long-term societal or environmental goals, where the future can’t be left to chance or inertia. Hannah uses this model to help clients align bold aspirations with grounded actions, building roadmaps that consider stakeholders, systems, and values — not just market forces.
Whether she’s helping brands explore circularity, redesigning services with equity in mind, or facilitating design workshops at the Harvard x Design Conference and the MIT Sloan Design Club, Hannah brings this dual lens to every project: grounded in the now, and oriented toward the next.
A Practice That Bridges Time
Hannah’s ability to operate in both the near and far term makes her work unusually impactful. By combining the empathy and immediacy of trend-based design with the vision and structure of future thinking, she helps teams move beyond reactive problem-solving — and into intentional, long-view creation.
