COncepts of the future
Hello, hello to whoever you are, my dear reader!
Put your seatbelt on and get ready to get back to the future. Or rather to explore the world of design futures. But let’s start with a small introspection, because what is a future without the ones who are going to build it, and that is you, and me. And since it is us who are going to shape the future of design and by design the world as well it would be a great oversight to not look into our overlook on the present and future of the world. And that’s also how my Contemporary Design Culture class started this week. I was directed to position myself within one of the quadrants in the room on a scale of I think things are good and getting better/bad and getting worse, and I think I can act to make them better/I can do nothing about them. You can try deciding with which of the extremes of those two elements you agree more and then try looking at it from an outsider’s perspective. I got situated in the things are good and getting better square since this is what I believe to be true. It would be hard to be a designer that wants to create for a change and bring improvement and beauty to the lives of people around me if I didn’t have a positive outlook on the world and my possibilities to influence it as a designer and as a person as well. So think at which of those two scales would you put yourself and ask yourself a question how that impacts your thinking, because even when you think that things are getting worse if you think you can do nothing to influence the future to change for better, I hate to break it to you but you’re probably someone who wouldn’t mind living in a fallen dystopia and waking up every day to complain about their life. Sorry, that’s how I see it.
But coming back to the topic at hand, what actually are design futures, well it is a slightly bigger thing than just simply designing products that are going to be used in the future. It is an open space unlimited by current technological, social and conceptual restrictions. Design futures allow you to put out a crazy project without necessarily knowing each of the steps leading to its execution. Because why not just design for ourselves from a decade ahead. Trying to make things better by then can actually at some point get kickstarted in the closer now and It can help you influence the change at a more rapid pace.
There might not be a set recipe to figure out the future we are going to approach but there surely are some methods we can all use to look through the keyholes of the doors leading to that futures. Future scaping, horizon scaping and trend mapping, also going back from the ideas that we think might start to exist and tracing back the steps to try and figure out how the desired future may come about to be. All of those practices are set in space to allow us to explore the future of design and this world. And we can also look at other designers who are creating more forward looking, conceptual work.
One of my favourite designers of this sort is Iris Van Herpen. A dutch fashion designer who incorporates modern technologies into the world of fabric. Her studio uses 3D printing, working with resin and also collaborates not only with designers and artists but also scientists. Her designs seem to be out of this world and they carry with them a certain feeling of futurism. They all seem so technological yet organic, so structured, yet so flowy. They are certainly an expression of the next step in garment evolution. A step to the future from the present point of view.
Another one of creators and designers who produce more conceptual work and present commentary about the future is Jean Jacques Balzac. A french architect and visual artist who using his skill and a little bit of help from AI generates images of wrong architecture. Pieces of design that make you ponder and look deeper into the structures and elements of the contemporary design and architecture that shape our daily world and how those if left unstructured could turn into a completely different element of everyday landscape.
Both of those designers take a different approach but generate the beauty and the beasts of the futuristic landscape. Both of them can serve as a source of inspiration for design projects and a great point of reference as to how one can blend a future with modernity. A time beyond reach with a time currently passing.
But designers aren’t the only thing we can source from. There are as well movies and books that talk about imaginary futures and allow us to look into them and build on their base. Some of my favourite sources of inspiration for future oriented designs usually have a little bit of influence from those forms of media expression. I would like therefore to share with you a short list of movies and books I like to reach out for when creating (in no particular order).
Blade Runner
10 Things I Hate About You
Annihilation
Interstellar
Inception
Matrix
Project Hail Mary
Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story
Ender’s Game
Oppenheimer
The Bible
Pride and Prejudice
Something the Lord Made
Dune
And when it comes to them all it's not only the visual in those movies, or description of objects in the books that make me want to design, a lot of the time it’s a phrase, the story as whole, a concept completely foreign to design that makes me think about the future and the field I’m in. It’s the complete dissociation of the concept from my daily life that allows me to look into my design with a foreign worldview for creation.
And with my list I also wanted to share with you a designer problem of the week: When you put on some media for inspiration in the background but it turns out being so good that you get distracted from your work.
Love,
The one and only Maria