When I started I had quite a techno-centric view of futuring. This was soon dispelled after experiencing Genevieve Bell’s (2013) breathtaking journey thru the last 500 years of history of how different societies construct their own peculiar socio-technological imagination. For example, she traced and contrasted how the same clockwork technology eventually led to a fear that as machines get smarter, they will soon kill us in the west compared to a more robot friendly culture that developed in Japan.
Bell discussed not just the practical aspect of building technologies & systems that comport to humans (making the technology do the work for us and not the other way around), she also talked about how technology shapes the imagination. It’s not just about physically building things, it’s also about what are the stories we tell about and are told about what the technology does, and our relationships to technology. The socio-technical is the imaginary new world we are all talking about and perennially designing for. It’s the worlds we shape through our actions, our words, our visioning of the future that is hugely important.
I also had a linear and incremental conception of a singular future. This was opened up when I encountered Sohail Inayatullah’s (2008) new approach to the study of the future. I was able to have a go at applying his six foundational concepts of future studies.
I applied the Used Future to the NSW Government’s dreadful WestConnex project (Sydney Motorway Corporation 2017) which is following the used future of Los Angeles where a city designed for cars led to a massive suburban sprawl with enclaves of settlements linked by gridlocked motorways. Where people only live with people of their own kind and travel in the bubble of their own cars never interacting and intermingling with people from different backgrounds which led to alienation, intolerance and xenophobia as poignantly featured in the movie Crash (2005).
I recognised the use of a disowned future in a Black Mirror episode (The Entire History of You 2011) which took a technology to extend our human capacity to remember to the extreme where implants allow us to remember everything which led to a bitter jealousy between a married couple. Technology which allows us to perfectly remember everything may impair our ability to forgive and to heal from past trauma because we can always replay what the other person did that hurt us.
I recognised a comprehensive use of an alternative future in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle novel which was made into an Amazon Studio TV Series (2015). It is set in an alternative 1962 where the Axis powers won World War II and the United States was divided into the Greater Nazi Reich on the east, the Japanese Pacific States in the west, and some free states in the middle.
I recognised how Elon Musk’s (Y Combinator 2016) business ventures and philanthropic activities align with his mission to ensure the survival of humanity.
I discovered Frederic Laloux’s (Reinventing Organizations 2014) model for social change in new forms of soulful self-organising productive organisations without leaders and layers of management, and at the same time not bogged down by consensus gridlock.
I recognised the use of the future in a long now that provides a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common (The Long Now Foundation 2017).
Lastly, I started out having drunk the kool-aid of start-up nation. I believed I should design commercially successful products to make my dent in the universe. Dunne and Raby’s (2013) conception of speculative design, fiction and social dreaming opened up for me a critical design alternative to this.
Among other things, Dunne and Raby showed me how darkness can be an antidote to naive techno-utopianism and can jolt people into action. In a way, this is what the Black Mirror television series does. The “Be Right Back” episode (2013) explores what happens when we as citizen-consumers share as much as possible of our life memories, thoughts, and behaviours in social media, and artificial intelligence technology has become so good at using all these data to re-create a version of us after we die. How would that affect our relationships to those we left behind after we die? As what one would see from the episode, it’s not all roses.
Dune & Raby posits critical design between the extreme shock & weirdness of art and the normality of what is assimilated. To them, the key feature of critical design as distinct from art is how well it sits in this world. It’s here-and-now but at the same time, it also belongs to another yet-to-exist one.
That’s why it is important for Dunne & Raby for the design to be made physical, for the values & beliefs to be embodied. Something that’s accepted as being here but disturbs us a bit. Quoting Martin Amis, they said referred to this as a ‘complicated pleasure’.
Lastly, like Genevieve Bell, Dune & Raby highlights the importance of using imagination to challenge how we think about everyday life. By this, we keep alive other possibilities. Life could be different.
References
Be Right Back 2013, television program, Black Mirror, Channel 4, London, 11 February.
Bell G. 2013, Stanford Seminar – Magical Thinking: Fear, Wonder & Technology, video recording, YouTube, viewed 20 October 2017, <https://youtu.be/5aKZwKFFDYw>.
Crash 2005, motion picture, Lions Gate Australia, Sydney.
Dunne, A. & Raby, F. 2013, ‘Design as critique’, Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Inayatullah, S. 2008, ‘Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming’, Foresight, vol. 10 issue 1, pp.4-21.
Reinventing Organizations 2014, Reinventing Organizations, video recording, YouTube, viewed 20 October 2017, <https://youtu.be/gcS04BI2sbk>.
Sydney Motorway Corporation 2017, WestConnex, viewed 20 October 2017, <https://www.westconnex.com.au/>.
The Entire History of You 2011, television program, Black Mirror, Channel 4, London, 18 December.
The Long Now Foundation, The Long Now Foundation, viewed 20 October 2017, <http://longnow.org/>.
The Man in the High Castle 2015, television program, Amazon Studios, Seattle.
Y Combinator 2016, Elon Musk : How to Build the Future, video recording, YouTube, viewed 20 October 2017, <https://youtu.be/tnBQmEqBCY0>.
Exploring our sexual futures 