ABSTRACT
Design is about shaping the future of the world we live in. Yet in many ways it seems a hopeless endeavour, predicated upon the failure of our predecessors. Had they succeeded in shaping a future for us, then we would have nothing left to do save to fall in line with their imperatives. Likewise, were we to succeed in shaping the future of our successors, then they in turn would become mere users, confined to the implementation of designs already made for them. Designs, it seems, must fail, if every generation is to be afforded the opportunity to look forward to a future that it can call its own. Indeed the very history of design could be understood as the cumulative record of concerted human attempts to put an end to it: an interminable series of final answers, none of which turns out, in retrospect, to be final after all. Or to adapt a maxim from the architectural writer Stewart Brand: All designs are predictions; all predictions are wrong ( Brand 1994: 75).
