ABSTRACT
The future is already loaded with our fantasies, aspirations and fears, persuasively designed visions and cultural imaginaries. Designed things, lifestyles and imaginaries, or ‘stuff-image-skill’, endure, proliferate and occupy the future. This chapter reflects upon issues of futurity for design. It briefly characterizes ‘concept’, ‘critical’ and ‘persuasive’ design practices, because they explicitly take on the future by formulating visions, speculating on alternatives and steering toward particular ideals. The future—indeed, temporality—has only entered substantially into design discourses and practices relatively recently. Design, and other disciplines such as architecture, geography and geology, have long been materially and spatially preoccupied. An ontological structure for time that posits ‘the future’ as a place or time apart makes possible our dominant conceptions of history and modernity. It also allows us to posit the future as an outside. This ontological structure of time is specific to modern Western societies and there are many other ways of understanding and relating to time.
