Irem Tekogul
Future visions embody our hopes and dreams, worries and fears about what is yet to come. While approaches such as speculative design, experiential futures and design fiction are more explicit about their commitment to exploring alternative futures, all design(ing) is oriented towards the future. However, increasing precarity, which is defined as a profound and objective uncertainty over the future, so that “there will be no future” becomes the dominant vision (Pulcini, 2020). While design is seen as giving form to futures (Mazé, 2016), design theorist Tony Fry cautions that designers have been complicit in what he terms defuturing, which means the negation of the world’s futures (2020). Then, in the face of increasing precarity, how can we re-orient towards designing hopeful futures instead of defuturing? Following Arjun Appadurai (2013), I join the call for reframing hope as a politics of action to make futures otherwise. Hope, in this sense, is not passive wishing or waiting but a factor in mobilising collective action for alternative futures. At the same time, fictional expectations about the future can be used to cement the present-day status quo. Thus, it matters what hopes we are designing with or whose hopes we are weaving into future visions. To begin exploring these questions, I examine future-oriented design practices and investigate how hope is embedded, materialised and enacted in future-making. I draw on data from an ethnographic field study of the design laboratory at the Silicon Valley Research and Development division of a multi-national technology company. In this presentation, I critically reflect on the role hope plays in future making and explore emerging design practices that highlight possibilities to employ hope for catalysing systemic change.
KEYWORDS: futures thinking, strategic foresight, politics of hope, innovation
RSD TOPIC(S): Cases & Practice, Economics & Organizations, Sociotechnical Systems