Design futures
What if the UK measured its national success by social cohesion [1] other than GDP?
“Existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of.” (Kundera, 1988)
It feels important to start this blogpost by recognising that all design practices, from architecture to graphic design, are concerned with and have an impact on the future. In every design work there is a desire to create something new through imagining how things could be and then exploring how to materialise this imagination into something that can exist in the world. So, if shaping the future is an intrinsic part design, what makes “design futures” different from other design disciplines?
We could start answering this question by looking at how historically design became absorbed in the industry and developed a growing concern to respond to consumer’s needs: over time, a good design became increasingly associated with a functional design. This problem-solving attitude is the foundation of the Affirmative Design mindset that dominates the current design practice, it weakens the opportunity design has to “dream its own dreams” as it perpetuates the status quo other than challenging it (Dunne & Raby, 2014).
Moreover, through this problem-solving focus, most design practices end-up promoting a belief that “human needs can be satisfied by standardised goods and services” (Leitão, 2022, p. 260) as if there was a foolproof goal we should work towards to. And so, through “techno-fixes”, designers have become focused in trying to close this gap between the messy “tangible reality” and the idealistic “normative desired state” that, not surprisingly, never comes to fruition (Leitão, 2022).
Design futures comes in to challenge this Affirmative Design mindset by shifting the design focus from the world that exists now to designing for what the world could be (Dunne & Raby, 2014, p. 69). For that, design futures can be seen as a discipline that inverts the design logic from designing with a fixed and normalised target in mind, to design being the support for open-ended explorations of what we want this target to be (Leitão, 2022).
In this sense, by adopting methods and tools from future studies and speculative design disciplines, design futures releases the service design practice from the Affirmative Design territory and introduces it to the Critical Design realm, where the status quo can and should be challenged and in which we can dare to imagine futures despite and beyond the present social, cultural, technical or economic constrains (Salinas, 2022, p. 519).
But how does this work in practice?
What the world should be?
Towards a preferable future
Thinking about the future is part of everyone’s life and, yet, we often feel scared about it. Scared that the future might bring uncomfortable or inconvenient changes to our lives, especially if they require us to change our mindset or ways of being [2]; so in seeking for comfort we become fans of continuity and tend to project our futures as an extension of our present lives (Dufva & Rowley, 2022, p. 7). However, we are living in post-normal times where changes are not only unavoidable, but are also happening faster and simultaneously, making the future “intrinsically complex, chaotic, contradictory, uncertain and rapidly collapsing in and upon themselves”. (Sardar & Sweeney, 2015, p. 2).
So instead of trying to push back on changes we need to find ways to be agents for the future we want to see happening, after all, the future doesn’t just happen, the future is built by us and, if we pay close attention to the present, we can see trends that provides us with a hint to what the future is likely to become: for example, no one can deny that AI will be part of our future. While these “probable” futures are somewhat easy to imagine we can start imagining other visions of the futures that were previously unnoticeable (because they are hard to see) or ignored (because we don’t want to see) through scanning and amplifying weak signals of change [3].
It is important to say though that neither looking at trends or weak signals is concerned at making predictions (the future is unpredictable, and we might as well accept that), but this exercise help us see that there are more possibilities, other futures that could exist if we dared to explore them. Futures that might not be probable, but that are plausible enough, and ideally preferable to the future that seems set to unfold. Once we imagine the future we want we can then approach design from a different angle, considering which steps to take at present time to get us closer to this preferable future.
World-building as critical design practice
The interesting thing about exploring preferable future worlds is that it opens the opportunity for us, designers and non-designers, to speculate, imagine, analyse, and criticise new ways of existence that are “transgressive (challenge paradigms) and repellent (challenge values)” (Sardar & Sweeney, 2015, p. 3). Asking “what if?” questions can be a good starting point for building new worlds, even if they come from a far-fetched idea, or even if they don’t seem realistic, we can exercise our thinking to consider if this would be a future we would like to live in or not. And while exploring why people might or might not desire this future, designers become problem-finders other than problem-solvers.
“What if the UK measured its national success by Social Cohesion other than GDP?” was the question my group explored during our Design Futures unit [4]. Picking up on signals related to a change in narratives of work after Covid-19 pandemic, the appearance of wellbeing budgets and policies within the UK, as well as a global development of more holistic approaches to national development, my team was interested in exploring a future where social capital was more valued than financial capital. Would that be a preferable future? If Social Cohesion were to replace GDP, who would benefit from this change? Who wouldn’t? What problems would this future create?
Exploring the problems of this world is important as design futures doesn’t believe in an “all round” perfect utopian world. It stays grounded and understands the complexity of the present reality. Yet, through backcasting, meaning, from setting a new paradigm to then exploring what this shift would mean for our everyday lives, gives us the ability to explore our desires, boundaries and speculate what actions we could take at present time to influence the future towards something we find preferable.
Despite the powers of imagination, just imagining a world might not be enough to make us truly reflect on the impacts of this world. In fact, design futures believes in the power of experience and makes a case for the use of props and objects to ground people’s imagination into something tangible. By building up the storytelling from prototypes and touchpoints people are prompted to consider what else is happening in this world, what is the political scenario, how are the social relations, and which are the paradigms ruling this world (Dunne & Raby, 2014, p. 75). People can then experience what actually feels like living in such a world and therefore reflect on what this future means for their daily lives, their community and the planet as a whole (let’s hope people consider more than themselves when thinking about the future). Only through this sensorial experience we can reflect and ask ourselves how do we feel about this world? But materialising abstract concepts into an object proved to be a challenging task…
Research through design
Throughout the development of my team’s project we experienced what Christopher Frayling coined as ‘research through design’ (a term to describe the process of creating knowledge through practice) (Frayling, 1993), and in our case I could see this happening in two different ways: the struggle to build the world through prototypes made us reflect on how to incorporate design futures into the service design practice; and on another level, the active testing of these prototypes allowed us to gain knowledge about the concept of our project.
The struggle came initially from what it seemed like a paradox: how could we spark interesting conversations through a rough prototype that would not communicate the whole world we were imagining? At the same time, how could we move forward with the building of this world without engaging with people first? Later on in the process it became clear that that was exactly the point: it was through a re-iterative process of conceptualising, prototyping, testing, and then conceptualising again that we would be able to refine the world we were co-creating.
And that’s what we did, based on our very inital “what if a disaster causes mass displacement of local communities throughout the UK?” we prototyped the “United Nomad Nation kit” which was presented as a service of the future to fellow students. Without providing much context we gathered that people were mainly interested in how this service would deal with the experience of nomads feeling (or not feeling) welcomed by a community. On the other hand, talking about nomads was distracting as it raised a debate around the current privilege enjoyed by digital nomads, which we were not interested in exploring.
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These reflection lead us to a different prototype where ‘nomads’ were renamed as ‘displaced person’ and the focus was in creating a sense of belonging for those arriving in a new community. The “fake memory album” was showcased to gov.uk (our main stakeholder for this project) sparking a debate that wasn’t about migration, nor sense of belonging, but about whether, in the future, the UK government should keep on being pragmatic on if it should develop a more relational approach to policy-making? We found this very interesting and decided to reframe our “what if” to encompass something more structural: the role of the future government. Would a government that valued social relationships over economic development lead us to a preferable future? And was it even plausible to consider a relational government in the near future?
An RSA interview with James Plunkett and Sophia Parker showed us that yes, not only a relational state is possible but would also be preferable. (RSA, 2021) Building on that we created a “Mandatory Civic Duty” service that would be imposed to all UK residents as a means to foster social cohesion. The issue here is that to bring the service to life, to make it feel “real”, we visualised it within the parameters of the existing bureaucratic system. This created too big of a tension between the concept (of social cohesion) and the prototype (a bureaucratic system), and because of that we were not able to depict the relational state we were curious to explore. Our future world ended up feeling as technocrat as the current (and for some the world we were proposing didn’t even seem like a preferable one as mandatory services were not welcomed by most people we engaged with, even if this meant a path to a more caring society). This “failure” made us reflect on how practices that are concerned with problem finding, such as design futures, heavily relies on an iterative processes as every new exploration unveils new problems to be considered; and yet at every stage there is knowledge being created around the future we’d like (or refuse) to live in.
Co-designing futures
Design futures embraces co-design methods through the understanding that knowledge is not limited to the experts. On the contrary, the methodology adopted is that everyone is an expert of their own experiences, and therefore knowledge is built from this collection of experiences. This is important for three main reasons: first to make the design practice more just by bringing as many voices as possible (and especially marginalised voices) into the design process. Which in turn helps us, designers, to challenge our assumptions and our biases. Finally, by adding more voices into the design process, designers can better understand the lives of others and explore the strengths and weaknesses of the work in broader and deeper levels.
At the same time, co-design should be a two-way street where non-designers contribute to the work by sharing their knowledge and experience, and designers do the same by presenting non-designers with their knowledge, tools, and methods. This is particularly relevant within the context of design futures as knowledge exchange contributes towards the ‘preparedness of people and societies for future changes’ (Dufva & Rowley, 2022, p. 3) and in consequence impacts on how we approach the construction of our future as a collective.
Incorporating the meaning and the value of design futures into my mind and into my practice hasn’t been easy. Not because I cannot understand it or because I can’t see the benefits of a speculative approach to design, but mostly because over the years my brain has been wired as a problem-solving brain and deconstructing this has proved hard. Despite my criticism to Affirmative Design (especially because it perpetuates a status quo that I know it’s not working) I recognise that affirmation can be comforting. It brings a sense of security, a sense of control, and for long it has laid out the foundation for our understanding of what a good design is: a design that guarantees that user’s needs will be met.
This idea of guarantee is well put by Hoffman when she describes how speculation is approached by the traditional urban design practice as a means to persuade stakeholders of the certainty of our ideas. As she says, speculation “can become a means to present that same [possible] future as inevitable […] depicting a proposal less as a possibility than a guarantee” (Hoffman, 2022, p. 3). And who can resist a guarantee? But, unfortunately, there’s no guarantees in the future… so we might as well embrace the opportunity that uncertainty gives us to let our imagination run free “not just for entertainment but for reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration.” (Dunne & Raby, 2014, p. 70). And in by doing that we might be able to start working towards a preferable future.
Turning into a culture that knows how and is comfortable with exploring possibilities (other than grab hold of certainties) will be much needed in face of the speed of changes happening in the world. As designer we can support this cultural shift by bringing in speculative methods into our practice. An example to this is Salinas’ work, which proposes the inclusion of Critical Service Design as a parallel activity during the policy making process as a way to provide “local government with a safe space for experimentation” (Salinas, 2022, p.524). Another path to foster a speculative culture is to create spaces where future worlds are presented in a tangible way so people can experience other ways of living and reflect on them. Parker’s idea of a “museum of the emerging future” (RSA, 2021) could be a good way to introduce future thinking to the broader society.
As Kundera suggests, the human existence should not be defined by what already happened, existence is dynamic and full of possibilities (Kundera, 1988). This unit made me reflect on my practice and I was pleased to see how the field of design is capable of self-criticism and an eagerness to try new approaches to improve itself. It shows humbleness in accepting that we don’t know it all, that we must keep trying and constantly reflecting on whether the ways that we work are still relevant to the world. Designers have now an opportunity to dare to see past what seems to be certain, and we have the skills and resources to promote a speculative and more resilient, adaptable culture.
On a cautionary note, I must stress the importance of co-designing and making changes bottom-up, as we cannot forget that Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism all came from an attempt to make utopias real through a top-down approach (Dunne &Raby, 2014).
References
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Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2014) Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and Social Dreaming. S.l.: MIT.
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Frayling, C. (1993) ‘Research in Art and Design,’ Royal College of Art Research Papers 1 (1).
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[1] In this project social cohesion is refers to the strength of relationships and the sense of solidarity among members of a community and which feeds from its diversity.
[2] This pushback on change can be exemplified by the way we are approaching the climate crises, something that has been in our horizons for decades and that has arrived on us already, yet we still treat it as if it was as a concern for a future further ahead. Because if we were to accept the reality of it we would need to radically change our ways of living, and who is up for that? (Dufva & Rowley, 2022, p. 7).
[3] Trends are easier for us to identify, they lead to a sense of continuity and make us think in terms of “what’s next”. Weak signals however are more subtle, as they are ‘a first symptom of change or sign of an emerging phenomenon that could be significant in the future.’ (Dufva & Rowley, 2022, p. 4)
[4] The Design Futures unit is a 7-week course delivered to MA Service Design students at LCC/UAL. On this occasion we were developing a project to expand/inform gov.uk’s strategy and ways of working .
