Amidst the environmental collapse, it is imperative that academia reflects on how future designers need to unlearn and shift the industrial design mindset to proactively and responsibly design to remediate the present and create more ecological and just futures. The next generation of designers must consider the systemic implications of their creations catalysing a shift in design reflecting ecological and social values into their professional out-puts. This paper sets up the contested issues for Design Futures against a background of exponential industrialisation, climate change, de-anthropocentrisation and moves towards asking how Design Futures can develop restorative avenues. Here we aim to address the Royal College of Art (RCA) educational challenge of moving away from traditional future design approaches (design fictions, futures visions and speculative design) to transition towards re-futuring. In the paper, we describe a selection of PhD research projects at the RCA which take different trajectories in ex-ploring new practices and approaches to Design Futures. From this point, we will triangulate literatures between contemporary ecological critiques, systems, and contemporary future critiques to underpin the problems and opportunities emerging for design to propose a new academic model for re-placing Industrial Design. As distant as these futures are or may be, they are a useful tool to explore unthinkable possibilities, remediate prevalent problems and help us to move towards preferable design practices.