ABSTRACT
Futures and change are treacherous intellectual territory. The industry of futures and prediction, once a peripheral and largely instinctive arm of market research, is mainstream and based on defined research methodologies. This chapter looks first at some moments when designers have conjured up visions of better futures, and at critical futures. Some design, and some design anthropology, sees its temporal work as the presentation of new social futures to the world. The Center for Genomic Gastronomy uses artistic methods to explore the science, futures and cultures of food. Speculative futuring and critical design might be called social science. The work of G. Deleuze has been fundamental to dismantling modernist notions of time as linear, revealing the variability of temporality and exposing the various modes of human orientation to the future. Designed things, because they are explicitly temporal and future-oriented, are particularly inclined to become recognised as organising metaphors by which people are able to think about their time.
