2026-10-292026-10-29https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14938/13902051, or: How Did We Get Here is an interdisciplinary design research project developed in collaboration between Berlin International University of Applied Sciences and Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory. The project investigated the application of speculative design and backcasting as methodological frameworks within design education, using the future transformation of selected Berlin sites as its primary research context. Students from architecture, interior design, and communication design worked in interdisciplinary teams, each assigned to a specific urban site: Warschauer Brücke, Landwehrkanal, FC Union Berlin stadium, Westhafen harbour, and the A100 highway. The project was taking place in two phases. The first phase, The Seed, required students to do a small-scale, site-specific intervention: a temporary installation, event, or collective action carried out in the existing urban environment. The second phase, The Imagined Plant, extended this intervention into a speculative scenario projecting the site's transformation by 2051. Scenarios were developed through backcasting from explicitly preferred futures, drawing on Voros's futures cone framework (2000), which distinguishes between possible, plausible, probable, and preferred futures as a structure for thinking and designing for future. Student projects were presented in the exhibition 2051: And Everything Turned Out Rather Well at Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, Berlin, on 28 and 29 January 2026. The project contributes to ongoing discourse on speculative design as a research methodology, and emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in design education. The projects demonstrated the capacity of speculative and backcasting methods to generate design proposals that are simultaneously site-specific and addressing general societal and political changes.