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 creating a more ecological and just future(s). The next generation of designers must catalyse a shift in design reflecting ecological and social values into their professional outputs. This paper sets up the contested issues for design futures against a background of industrialisation, climate change, and de-anthropocentrisation and moves towards asking how design futures can develop restorative futures. Here we aim to address the 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 that take different trajectories in exploring 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 replacing Industrial design.