Design and Future
By: Patricia Sánchez
Tags: Responsibility, Alternative Futures, Design

*This text is part of a class about the relationship between design and future in the Interaction workshop (1st year course) at the Design School of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. At this course we encourage students to be curious about the capacities of design as a tool to understand and transform the world at the same time.

From the future to “the futures”

Before even beginning to talk about the concept of future, I think it’s important to briefly speak about time, which could be understood as a major concept in which the future is contained. Time –not in a scientific but in a social sense– doesn’t exist by itself if not as something we’ve created as a measure of our actions. Everything we do can be measured in time and it even tells us if we are being efficient or not. The existence of time is important as it allows us to orientate and situate ourselves in history as individuals and as society and therefore it gives context to our actions. The clock then becomes a symbol of said importance of time, a materialization of how our lives revolve around a measure that’s socially constructed and not necessarily fits us all: “With the presence of the clock, time will be dissociated from the rhythm of the planets and the seasons, from experience and memory” (trad. from Carrasco & Recio, 2014). That’s how without realizing, we live in a constant state of awareness about how our actions reflect in the future. We do or stop doing things hoping they will assure us a better future that –according to our clocks– seems to never arrive.

The future, in a linear conception of time, it’s what’s ahead of us. The things that have not happened yet but it’s not an empty space but one that’s already outlined by the consequences of our present actions. That’s why we are able to destabilize the future –even if it seems already written– through our everyday practice in the present. Trying to predict the future makes no sense, science and technology have not been able to do it for centuries and it only reflects how badly we want to control everything. What we are actually able to do is to dream and imagine what could happen, the potential futures. Those potential futures can be classified in 4 large groups that take us out of the linear conception of time and replace it with a number of cones fanning out from the present to the future (Dunne & Raby, 2013). The 4 groups are:

PROBABLE: This is where most designers operate. It’s the one that best describes what is likely to happen if we continue doing things the same way and without any major crisis ahead. PLAUSIBLE: This is the space of what could happen, it’s the place for planning and foresight. It’s where things don’t seem desirable but are quite convincing. A few years ago, we could have placed the covid-19 pandemic here. POSIBLE: This is where today’s world links with every suggested future, even the ones that sound like fantasy. There are not impossible future scenarios, just some that are out of our current understanding of science and some others where we can’t imagine the path to them yet. PREFERABLE: The future where probable and plausible intersects according to our aspirations. But it seems important to ask ourselves: preferable for whom? and under what circumstances?

Nowadays, specially in the middle of multiple crises we are facing and with the constant advances in science and technology around us, we have lost our capacity of dreaming about new future scenarios and are instead beginning to just hope that things will work out someway. Contradictorily, we could use some of that dreaming to take our minds off to more desirable future scenarios.

But, to which idea of time are we referring to when we talk about present or future? The capitalist idea of time has separated productive from reproductive time and has made us value the first one above the other. Carrasco and Recio also refer to productive time as “measured time” (Carrasco & Recio, 2014) because it’s the time others are measuring for us and we have no control over it. We tend to project our lives from a productive point of view: Where will I be working? What will I be producing? Instead of asking ourselves how our everyday lives will be, how those activities without payment we love so much will be. As this understanding of time is directly related to a neoliberal model of development, our society tends to marginalize those whose time can’t be measured for productive purposes such as children, elder or homeless people. Maybe a more egalitarian society should be based on equal management of our individual times. In the current pandemic scenario with constant lockdown periods around the world, it’s been particularly interesting to see people face the domestic activities previously invisible to many of them and see how much effort it takes to keep the house going. In many ways, what is uncomfortable of working or studying from home is the disappearance of the border between productive and reproductive spaces. But, which are the activities that give meaning to our lives? Which ones do we want to project into the future? How would a socioeconomic system that allows us to balance them better be?

Why is it important to think about the futures from design?

“Design is inherent about future (…) while ideas about possible futures are internal representations in the mind, designers externalize those ideas and give them a coherent representation that communicate ideas about the future with others thereby increasing awareness and understanding about possible futures across wider audiences” (Heidaripour & Forlano, 2018)

Design, beyond it’s known capacity of problem solving –which is the most popular way of understanding the discipline–, has the potential to show us that other future narratives are possible because we can experience them through design interventions and prototypes. This is why events that destabilize –for better or worse– our everyday lives are a matter of concern: they show us other ways of doing things are possible, they enter the future into negotiation and propose a future where things now considered extraordinary could be the rule.

“Although ideas about the future are not applicable for immediate action, they inform us and créate a culture of thought that gradually impacts our current practices and social orders. In other words, through the construction of everyday practices, the practice of formgiving to alternative futures could destabilize dominant power relations.” (Heidaripour & Forlano, 2018)

When we bring the future to the present through our designs, we are choosing towards which future we want to move. It’s not about trying to predict the future but about giving access to the possibilities that it has so new and alternative futures could be discussed, debated and used to collectively redefine where we want to go as society. The choice of which future we want to materialize is –without a doubt– a political act and can’t be done from innocence and ignorance as it has been done so far. We are so blinded by how easy it is to objectively understand our users that we have ethically and politically distanced ourselves from our practice. We believe to be materializing the dreams of the majority but we haven’t even questioned who that majority actually is. We have left our voice out of our designs, they have our style but do they communicate our ideas? We prefer to be silent than uncomfortable. All social aspects can be modified (trad. from Carrasco & Recio, 2014), we only need to convince and mobilize enough people to make it happen and we can do it by letting them experience the alternative futures through our designs. In the current multidimensional crisis scenario it’s worth asking ourselves –through design–: How could a new relationship between government, market, citizenship and consumption be?

How does a designer approach futures?

What seems to conflict most designers about speculation about alternative futures is to design for non-existent scenarios, therefore design things that can’t be sold because they belong to a fictional scenario. We are so familiar with the market dreams that we’ve lost the capacity of dreaming our own futures and even less the collective ones. Outside the market we are free to experiment but at the same time nobody knows we are doing it. Let’s not forget that above all things we design relationships, we mediate the interaction between actors and their consequences and we amplify ideas. We must not ignore these capacities but use them in our favor to open the debate about what world we want to live in.

As professionals, we feel pressured to make useful things, things that serve an immediate purpose, things that solve “design problems” we’ve found, but thinking there’s a “design solution” to every “design problem” is a conceited and innocent idea. It’s hard for us to think of design that only seeks to generate reflection and debate fulfills a function in society just because it doesn’t give an answer to a question but instead opens us to curiosity and moves us towards a process of analysis and critical thinking about the world around us. The critical capacity of design is equal or even more powerful than its capacity to communicate ideas. We have the ethical and moral responsibility to make ourselves aware of how norms, values and other social constructs are produced and reproduced in society through the things we design.

Something many alternative design practices have in common –such as design explorations, design research, speculative design, among others– it’s that they move outside of what we consider possible and even real. When we design for how things could be we open new and much richer possibilities for ideas and dreams. The antagonist here would be a design that says yes to everything and accept inequality as an unalterable condition, it reinforces the status quo without trying to understand and modify the world. If we intend to know and transform the world, we have to observe and describe it first, we can’t project and tell stories about a desired future without understanding the relationships that exist in the present.

Our responsibility with the future

In addition to the already mentioned multidimensional crises we currently live in, there’s a strong critique from the citizens to the professionals. We are supposed to build a bridge between two groups that refuse to touch: the ones who decide how we live and the ones who live by the consequences of the first group decisions, but we are not fulfilling this task and instead we are just increasing the distance between them as we explain with our technical concepts to those “on top” how those “on the bottom” live and think (trad. from Fauré, 2014). As professionals we’ve had the privilege of participating in spaces of critical reflection and must try to actually shorten the distance between the ends of said bridge. At the same time, as members of the society we have the responsibility to not conform with how things are and dream about other ways of doing things. Finally, as designers, we are challenged to prototype those dreams so many people as possible can access them. When are we going to stop materializing the dreams of the industry and beginning to materialize the dreams of the society? It’s not about just adapting methodologies as design thinking from one sphere to another –from business fields to public policies for example– because as those methods have been thought and produced for business they are trapped seeking for quick answers that can be achieved in the short term. The market is not willing to question the current context because it’s comfortable in it and all his actions are towards sustaining it. If we just transfer these forms of design from private to public we are also transfering the customer-service way of relationship between the government and the citizens. The public sphere should not be a space for that kind of logic but a space of cooperation and shared responsibilities between the ones involved towards a common goal.

To question the current values and paradigms doesn’t take away from us the capacity of design for the present but it challenges us to stay updated as to methodologies and topics to work with. It doesn’t have to be better, but it has to show alternatives instead of answers.