Critical activism

Anab Jain is a leading light of experiential futures practice. She is cofounder with Jon Ardern of the London-based "vanguard foresight and design organisation" Superflux, whose work has rightly earned attention and admiration far and wide, with projects like Mitigation of Shock (an installation), Instant Archetypes (a tarot deck), and Drone Aviary (a film, and more).

Image from Mitigation of Shock by Superflux, an installation at CCCB portraying a small London apartment adapted for climate change in 02050 (02017)

We first met in 02009, just a few years into our own first experiments with experiential futures, following a talk I gave on that topic at the Long Now meetup in London one evening during my time visiting 'Design Interactions' at the Royal College of Art. This was the highly influential MA program led for a decade by the wonderful Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne from which Anab had graduated back when it was still a degree in 'Interaction Design' –– prior to the 02008 landmark MoMA exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, which contributed much to the visibility of the work of not only Dunne and Raby but also their mentees, in what they called at the time 'design for debate' and 'critical design', and well before 'speculative design' framing coalesced (as mentioned by Anab below), a development of the past five years or so.

Superflux got underway in 02009, a few months after we'd met in London, and Anab and Jon were among the first designers to set up shop in a way that engaged the tradition and practices of the futures field not just explicitly (using the language) but substantively too (really using the tools). For instance we recently collaborated on introducing foresight to International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) via experiential scenarios deployed at IFRC's biennial strategy meetings.

This post is an abridged version of a conversation appearing in the recently published Journal of Futures Studies special issue Design and Futures, Volume I.

Anab's sense of the work as "slow critical activism" really resonates with me, and her candour here, talking about the behind-the-scenes challenges of maintaining a design/futures business that is both viable and principled, is super generous and helpful, I think, for the many newcomers eager to figure out how they can practically make this sort of thing a part of their work lives.

***

SC: How do you situate your practice in relation to futures and design?

AJ: I think we are situated somewhere in the middle. We have a two-pronged approach. We do foresight and horizon scanning – that big, meta-level stuff – but we simultaneously ground it with material explorations, ethnography, research, prototyping.

Obviously we come from a design/art background more than futures. Our schooling was often about what the implications of a certain technology on society might be. And over the years, we’ve studied the more traditional futures methods a bit, not quite as much as a futurist would.

SC: What are some projects or initiatives that you’ve been involved in that you consider exemplary of your approach?

AJ: Our approach has changed a lot. We often used to work around a technology, so we would pick something like quantum computing or optogenetics, and try and understand what its potential is, but also poetic implications that the scientists or the technologists might not have explored.

And we’ve moved from that to thinking more socially, politically. We’re very interested in the implications of living with climate change, so for a recent project, Mitigation of Shock, we really wanted to understand how to bring that future that is so abstract around climate change - especially in the Western part of the world - making it real and conceptually visceral, but also not dystopian.

SC: So you’ve been at it...

AJ: Nine years.

SC: I’m interested in how you imagine the work that you’re doing against the backdrop of an increasing number of people operating at this intersection. If there is a “you are here” point on a map of bigger activities going on, where do you locate yourself?

AJ: Oh, that’s a good question. We keep asking that ourselves.

'Speculative design' has become popular, the term; although we have never actively used that term so far. We are afraid of labelling the work we do within a specific discipline, because for us it’s changing all the time, and we want to have the freedom to change. So we just call ourselves designers, or artists even.

Where people are interested in our work, or want to commission us or hire us, they are not thinking about us as speculative designers or critical designers either. They’re thinking: "We need to think about the future, but we don’t know quite how to make it visceral enough to get people to understand the consequences."

Outside of the world of design, not so many people care whether we call what we do speculative design or not. Some people call us a think tank, some people call us a research unit, some people call us artists.

SC: What are you grappling with in relation to these practices at the moment?

AJ: Lots! We’ve gone from being tiny to growing quite a bit, and then, recently decided to consider more carefully where we go next, and stop just producing project after project after project. I think we are trying to understand what meaningful change looks like for us.

We keep getting emails from people, and we know that the work affects people and gets them to think differently, but how can we materialise it without using this language of evaluation and impact and measuring? Because these are not things that can be instantly measured. Something that you’ve done to provoke people could affect them and get them to think differently after years –– but how do we begin to surface that?

I see it as a form of slow critical activism. If our work becomes a catalysing force for people to imagine things they would not have been able to imagine otherwise, that’s powerful. But then what? We are at that stage right now.

Currently I think our work is moving in two directions: one, with people whose idea of the future we may not agree with personally, but who have a lot of power and influence to affect change at a large scale. Our work with them focuses on helping them consider broader, unintended consequences by enabling them to think differently and more broadly. Secondly, we work in the public sphere, triggering public imagination.

Organisations who have power and influence and can actually affect decisions around climate change or education, are so outcome driven, that their key question around any futures always seem to zoom in on: What are the outcomes we get, and what’s the impact, how will this affect our strategy?

SC: And what do you tell them?

AJ: We don’t really have a clear answer. We can say, okay, we did this with the UNDP, and that led to the opening of this completely new department where they’re thinking about alternative financing. Or we did this, where it affected a decision or policy change. Examples are few and far between where there is a clear, linear, obvious trajectory of 'impact'.

People want concrete stuff, and the thing is, there isn’t a concrete answer. There isn’t a concrete outcome, to be honest. The outcome is the process by which you will start shifting your thinking.

SC: What do you think are the most important things for people who are interested in this area of work to be aware of?

AJ: One of the questions I always get is, "How do you actually make money, and who are your clients?" and it’s like, it doesn’t seem plausible that we could even be doing work and be paid. We’re not set up to be making profit, but we are alright!

We could earlier this year have gone easily from eight to twenty people. But we realised that scaling in numbers is perhaps the wrong way of thinking about 'growth' for our studio, and the scale lies in the nature and ambition of each project, and the way it can influence a decision or change perception. The bespoke nature of our work means we cannot adopt a cookie cutter approach to our services. No brief is ever the same. And having a flexibility of staff and overheads to support such work is very important. We might have big ambitions, but it’s not dependent on the scale of our practice.

For a designer, it’s so tempting to have 20, 30, 40 employees, to become 'the office'. It is in the model. I am often asked: "How big are you? How many employees do you have?" And they will actually decide whether to give us work or not based on my answer. So yes, sometimes it’s tempting to scale because scale is a seen as a visible sign of success.

SC: I really like this unwillingness to settle for an inherited definition of success. Instead it’s striving for a certain quality of impact, or a certain kind of cultural presence.

AJ: We tried it, and we’re both not managers. Well, we do have to now, but we really enjoy the actual craft of storytelling, making, building, designing and all of that. So we want to find a way we can continue our practice.

SC: Have you ever done a futures process for your own organisation?

AJ: No! We should, shouldn’t we?

***

The full version of the conversation as published in JFS can be found here.

Thanks again Anab!

Related:
> Design and Futures, Volume I
> I Design Worlds (Liam Young in JFS)
> Experiential Futures: A brief outline
> On getting started in Experiential Futures
> An Experiential Futures interview
> Ghosts of futures past
> Killer imps (RCA Design Interactions)

Design is Storytelling

Design is many things: it's the giving of form, the shaping of experiences, and – oh, alright then – the solving of problems. In a broader sense, it is the distribution of ingenuity, translating ideas and intentions into realities. And in this light, design is also a matter of mapping and expanding possibility's horizons: telling new stories, and so conjuring paths to new worlds.

Design is Storytelling understands this. It's a new book by Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt (the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York), which is also the publisher of this slim and skilfully curated volume of ways to practice design in narrative mode.

At Situation Lab we're delighted that our imagination card game The Thing From The Future appears in the book as a key example of a design fiction tool. Design fiction is an object-oriented speculative idiom long developed and documented here as part of the wider transmedia landscape of experiential futures, which in turn deals with bringing future narratives to life by all means necessary.

In Lupton's words:

Many design projects are conceived as speculative proposals for the future. Exotic concept cars and lavishly art-directed videos for tech companies celebrate the wonders of growth and innovation. Other veins of design fiction are more critical. ...

The Thing from the Future, created by Stuart Candy and Jeff Watson, is a game that helps teams and individuals build stories about the future. ... The game can be played with groups of students or in community-based workshops as a co-creation activity.

[It] is a storytelling machine. Turning the design process backwards, it uses signals from a distant world to inspire new thinking. Candy calls this process reverse archaeology. [link] The results can be humorous or provocative as well as practical. The game stimulates serious conversations about social and environmental sustainability.

Design is Storytelling shares several examples of #FutureThing prompts, generated using the original four-suit edition, together with some witty sample responses that are playfully illustrated by Jennifer Tobias (see p. 51).

The book is filled with useful tools, and this game is not the only explicitly futures-related one: there's also the cone of plausibility (aka cone of possibility, aka cone of uncertainty; pp. 43-45), and the 2x2 matrix, a widely used process for scenario generation (pp. 46-47).

I want to acknowledge the relevance of Lupton's storytelling-centred collection to work that we've plotted here since 02006, and take the opportunity that the book presents to consider, from a personal vantage point, how I've seen design's self-understanding evolving to take advantage of the potential in the design/futures intersection which has been our focus throughout that time.

It's heartening to take stock of how things have changed.

When I first started teaching futures to design students, as a guest lecturer in Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby's Royal College of Art program early in 02009 (while completing a PhD on futures and design), there was precious little awareness of futures thinking or methods apparent in design education anywhere. Except for some pioneering hybrid practitioners, such as Lloyd Walker, Cindy Frewen, and Jason Tester, there seemed scant overlap between the two worlds (although no doubt precursors and parallels will keep coming to light). My introduction of foresight concepts and methods to design students at the RCA –– not least the cone of possibility itself* –– tapped a kind of latent energy on both sides that heavily influenced my decision to bring futures thinking more systematically to designers.

The next year, Nathan Shedroff asked me to create a foresight course in the Design MBA at California College of the Arts. Strategic Foresight is now a core part of the curriculum (the class is usually run by Jake Dunagan). The scenario-generation phase for that first time I ran the course was led by Jay Ogilvy, a former Yale philosopher professor and cofounder of Global Business Network, who at GBN had created a step-by-step process for teaching 2x2 scenario generation. Thanks to GBN's influence, and I believe in large part to Jay's pedagogy, this had become the most widely used way of creating scenarios for organisations around the world. It's gratifying to find Jay's methodological contribution recognised in Design is Storytelling (p. 47). Readers interested in the approach of a hybrid consulting futurist and philosopher should seek out his excellent book Creating Better Futures (OUP, 02002) and more recent journal article Facing the Fold (Foresight, 02011).

At the end of 02011 I delivered the closing keynote at AIGA's annual conference, a terrific platform for bringing futures-related ideas to wider attention in the design community. The talk was a little weird, but it helped opened up multiple continuing conversations and collaborations.

And meanwhile, OCAD University took the groundbreaking step of offering the first foresight-focused program in a design institution, the MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI). In 02013, OCAD U lured me away from Melbourne and a full-time consulting role at Arup, to Toronto, where I was the first external tenure-track SFI faculty hire, brought on as the program doubled in size to accommodate both full- and part-time cohorts. There, collaborating with wonderful colleagues Greg Van Alstyne and Suzanne Stein, I integrated experiential futures approaches (design fiction, live action roleplaying, etc) into the core curriculum, and led seven iterations of the Foresight Studio over three years. SFI is easily the largest graduate program at Canada's biggest art and design school, and it has by now unleashed well over 100 hybrid design/futures folks into organisations around the country and the world.

At the same time, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design has been integrating a form of systems literacy throughout the curriculum, under the banner of transition design. This effort, initiated by Head of School Terry Irwin with Gideon Kossoff, Peter Scupelli and Cameron Tonkinwise (who is now at UNSW), has incorporated a futures perspective since its inception [pdf link]. It has been gradually rolled out across the CMU design curriculum, top to bottom, over the past several years. December wrapped up my first semester on faculty, where I taught the Senior Design Studio alongside Terry Irwin and Stacie Rohrbach, and we formally brought transition design ideas to undergrads for the first time.

Our students tackled a variety of wicked problems (food, water, gentrification, air quality, and so on), mapping their contours historically and in the present before using futures tools to examine alternative pathways for the coming decades, and generating stories (visions) for the year 02050 to inspire design interventions for the long term. Methods and heuristics we covered included the cone of possibilities, scenario generation, and design fiction / experiential futures (i.e., methodological staples that have found their way from futures to the pages of Design is Storytelling); as well as some others as yet less widely known in the design world, like environmental scanning and three horizons.

Currently, working with colleagues including Peter Scupelli (who has now taught futures at CMU for some five years), Dan Lockton, Molly Steenson, Terry Irwin, and many others, I'm working on braiding a foresight thread through the undergraduate design curriculum. The intention is for it to become part of the standard repertoire of competencies used by and expected of 21st century designers.

So it's nearly a decade that my colleagues and I have been working to deliberately infuse futures methods into design education; and there are of course many other strands in this bigger story alongside the ones I can recount from first-hand experience. But this is a personal story that reinforces Ellen Lupton's core insight: design's storytelling – and worldbuilding – potential, though always present, has lately been moving from marginal to something much more central.

There's a wealth of further fuel for that fire in Design is Storytelling, both futures-flavoured and not, and the book manages to be both highly attractive and, in the best sense, utilitarian, while documenting a moment in time where design's recognition of its narrative possibilities and responsibilities only continues to grow. Check it out.

Related:
> The Thing from the Future
> TFTF UNESCO French/English edition
> Reverse archaeology 02013 / 02008
> Object oriented futuring
> Strategic foresight and the Design MBA
> Introducing futures at the RCA 

Killer imps

The Royal College of Art on one of the days I visited (beautiful weather unforeseen)

Last week and the week before, I had the privilege of joining the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art (RCADI -- previously mentioned here) for several sessions as a Guest Lecturer. It was an exhilarating and exhausting experience with a brilliant group of people, and I loved every minute of it. One of the many benefits of this valuable chance to weave our idiosyncratic version of futures into their idiosyncratic version of design was that it forced me, or enabled me (or some combination of those) to become considerably clearer on how the two play together.

The lecture I delivered on 12 March at RCA was titled "Design Interactions with Futures". Our point of departure was my observation that, when it comes to the intersection of design practice and futures practice, we can for analytical purposes discern two principal tendencies, facing in different directions. One is futures in support of design, and the other is design in support of futures. (I'm continually surprised by how hard-won, how long in coming, such basic insights can be -- and how blindingly obvious in retrospect.)

Those categories denote pretty much what you would expect. Futures in support of design describes work in which the exploration of one or more future scenarios is finally subservient to the creation of products, services, or whatever. Examples might include the design probes conducted by companies such as Philips, Nokia and Whirlpool; or the concept designs produced by Adaptive Path, such as the Charmr diabetes treatment device, and the Aurora web browser. All of these use an extended time horizon, therefore unhooked from certain present-day constraints, to facilitate more creative exploration of the artifacts that might become possible in the short- to medium-term. They are all, however, ultimately about making things.

Intuitively enough, design in support of futures, by contrast, describes that type of practice where design output is not an end in itself, but rather is used as a means to discover, suggest, and provoke. This territory, where design aspires to contribute to The Great Conversation reaching well beyond the community of design practitioners itself, is host to such concepts as "critical design", "design for debate" (both terms long used by RCADI masterminds Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby), and "discursive design" (a phrase I first encountered in this recent Core77 article). It's also a much better fit for the work that Jake Dunagan and I, with our various collaborators, have been doing for the past several years via FoundFutures and elsewhere. Whether they take the form of "theory objects" (which is not a bad descriptor for the types of things RCADI students often make), or of less fragmented, more immersive "experiential scenarios", design in support of futures and its ilk are all about the conversations and insights made possible by manifesting futures tangibly in various media.

I don't want to overdo the distinction between these two, because clearly concept designs informed by futures may enable exploratory conversation or debate, just as critical design artifacts intended to spur conversation may lead to products. (The first example of an ambiguous melding of the two that comes to my mind is the output of the so-called "design led futures" program at Victoria University of Wellington, recently blogged here.) Indeed, the mutually informing, overlapping, properties of these two modes of work for me simply highlight how fruitfully chaotic the design + futures intersection can be.

Since sharing the above ideas in London, I've had occasion to take this strand of thought a little further, particularly in relation to the similarities between the experiential futures work we've done and the practice of "Design for Debate" developed by Dunne and Raby.

Paola Antonelli is senior curator of design and architecture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which hosted the remarkable exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind last year, featuring the work of these critical design pioneers as well as several of their students. Earlier this week, in an article for SEED magazine, Antonelli wrote: "Design for Debate does not seek to produce immediately 'useful' objects, but rather meditative, harrowing, always beautiful object-based scenarios." Here's Dunne and Raby themselves on Design for Debate...*

Design today is concerned primarily with commercial and marketing activities but it could operate on a more intellectual level. It could place new technological developments within imaginary but believable everyday situations that would allow us to debate the implications of different technological futures before they happen.

This shift from thinking about applications to implications creates a need for new design roles, contexts and methods. It?s not only about designing for commercial, market-led contexts but also for broader societal ones. It?s not only about designing products that can be consumed and used today, but also imaginary ones that might exist in years to come. And, it?s not only about imagining things we desire, but also undesirable things -- cautionary tales that highlight what might happen if we carelessly introduce new technologies into society.

In conversation with the design duo over lunch last week, when they mentioned the distinction between applications and implications, it leapt out at me. Traditionally, design practice has been preoccupied with the former, whereas theirs, and that of their Design Interactions students, is more concerned with the latter. And it seems to me that this maps rather well onto what we examined a moment ago: "futures in support of design" amounts to an orientation to applications, while "design in support of futures" can be seen as pointing towards implications.

Applications are necessarily convergent -- concerning that part of the design process where ideas, intentions and constraints culminate and are distilled into solutions, embodiments of the exploration process. Implications, on the other hand, are intrinsically divergent, multiplicative, compound; not only are there alternative futures, but there are first, second, and third-order effects (and so on, as far as you care to go) for any given innovation or development you might name.

What futures uniquely contributes to the exploration of implications is a framework for the systematic exploration of these contingencies; ways of managing the mess of possibilities.

In exploring design applications, the futures component is by definition more instrumental. It is oriented to opening up new markets and product lines, and so is less apt to surprise or challenge in profound ways. It is preoccupied with the superficial "litany" layer of discourse, perhaps sometimes scratching the "social" layer too, as identified by academic futurist Sohail Inayatullah. Where the focus is on exploring implications, though, design is a vehicle by which futures are freed to unfold, and to take us where they will. Well-designed interactions "with" and experiences "of" future scenarios may help unearth, whether by challenge or gift, deeper dimensions such as desires, norms, and values. Put in terms of Inayatullah's framework, this entails addressing the worldview layer, and sometimes, maybe even touching our bedrock layer of metaphor and myth. That ideas about the future can be designed to be encountered and engaged affectively, as a part of the continuum of lived experience, rather than just linguistically and cognitively, as in a classic philosophical thought experiment, is essential. The key challenge, then, for those of us interested in this dimension of the design + futures conversation, is to figure out for any given scenario(s) which of the endless potential implications -- the folds and eddies we can detect in possibility space -- are the most potent, game-changing or significant, and to use these as triggers to take the contemplation of possible, probable and preferred futures to the deeper layers.

To put it another way, our lot (whether as "critical futurists" or "critical designers") is not to sniff out killer apps, but to acquire an instinct for identifying killer imps.

* These question marks appear in the original, in place of apostrophes. I was about to "correct" this formatting accident in the quote when I realised that it was entirely appropriate.

Related posts:
> Object-oriented futuring
> Tribal futures
> Morphing art and design into advertising
> Open Source futures and design
> Design led futures

Choose your instincts wisely

A day or two ago I stumbled across this fascinating project, the Alertness Enhancing Device by Susanna Hertrich, an MA student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, London.

Image: Susanna Hertrich, via we-make-money-not-art

Before/after | Image: Susanna Hertrich

Writes Hertrich:

This project picks on how much today's people have detached themselves from their original animal inheritance. Which of our lost animal abilities do we miss and how would we try to regain them?

It is said that no other generation before has been as anxious and risk aware as ours. Other than animals, we aren't equipped for the challenges of contemporary living. We don't have the abilities to identify the real dangers in a surplus of potential threats and horror scenarios offered to us by mass media. We don't have the right instincts to tell threat from panicmongering.

This device is meant as a physical prosthesis for a lost or missing natural instinct for the real fears and dangers that threaten us – as opposed to perceived risks that often cause a public outrage.
[...]
The device stimulates goosebumps and shivers that go down your spine through microcurrents resulting in your neck hair standing up. You will be more alert and ready for the real dangers in life.

A chart at Hertrich's website illustrates the tremendous disproportionality between statistical risks (below the line) and the issues that actually cause us to worry (above it):

Image: Susanna Hertrich

This is a marvellously clear portrayal of that disjuncture. (I'd like to dig into the data behind each of these misshapen risk-snowmen -- but details notwithstanding, it makes intuitive a rather tricky point, with a whole lot of examples.*) And the Alertness Enhancing Device is a splendidly provocative route toward narrowing that gap.

Adds Régine "we-make-money-not-art" Debatty:

While we consciously know what are the things that really threatens us, we tend to dedicate much more of attention to spectacular disasters with many deaths.

That's when the Alertness Enhancing Device comes in. If you feel dispassionate and bored when reading news stories about another environmental pollution scandal, it's probably time to turn the dial of the device on.

~"Prosthesis for a lost instinct", 21 February 02008

I'm excited about this project, but not on account of the recovery of "lost animal abilities" angle so much. That frame conceals, I think, what's rather more novel here. No animal -- including humanity -- has developed properly calibrated survival strategies, let alone instincts, for such challenges as traffic accidents, cancer, and pollution. These threats (in their present forms) play little or no part in the wilds of the jungle or savannah. They are not the problems we evolved to deal with, even though they have become some of the most pressing risks we now face.

This approach reunites the assertion of animality (if we insist on understanding our embodiedness that way), with highly subtle collective cognitive operation -- in effect, guiding evolution, which is of course what technocultural change is all about (McLuhan: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us"). What's interesting to me is that the recruitment of the body enables (more) direct feedback loops, expressed in somatic language, which bypasses (or, better yet, compresses into instantaneously "comprehensible" form) the complex conjecture of risk assessment. It also makes available a new take on both future-shock therapy and ambient foresight -- perhaps indeed a counterpart idea; embodied foresight -- concerning the engagement of new risks, in old forms. It's a programmable, strap-on judgment heuristic. Or, if you prefer, prosthetic intuition.

Taking the hypothetical proposed by this device a step further, I should add right away that we ought to be mindful of some of the risks (more risks!) associated with the implementation of such a system. Who wears it, and with what effects, and with what actrivation thresholds, and for what purposes -- all are politically charged questions raised even at the hypothetical level by an intervention of this form. Maybe my hackles are too quick to go up, but there are spectres here of Pavlov's dogs, of psychiatric treatments such as shock therapy, and more broadly speaking, other bodily and neural policing strategies (about which my colleagues Sean Smith and Jake Dunagan, among others, will be able to comment far more intelligently). Still, this activation and fine-tuning of instinctive responses for the purposes of presenting complex risks that provides great food for thought. Perhaps later versions could include specialised and nuanced bodily responses tailored specifically to the issue (so, for instance, riding in an SUV could cause your skin to crawl in a really unique way -- in case it doesn't already).

Commenting on Daniel Gilbert's observations about why climate change is such a tough issue for us to wrap our primate heads around, it was noted here a couple of months ago that...

without a mechanism for manifesting the outcome of long-slow processes here and now, a mechanism for rendering visible the risks and opportunities that are otherwise invisible, we will have no choice but to keep stumbling on happiness and catastrophe alike.

This is a really cool project, I think, because it asks us to rethink and perhaps redesign the coupling of our thoughts and feelings, the unmooring of which have put at serious risk not just our bodies, but entire ecosystems. It suggests how we might choose to render available otherwise abstract and distant thought processes, both immediately and profoundly. So, prosthetic intuition about risk scenarios, both wearable and distributed elsewhere in our informational environments, will now figure more prominently in my ruminations about how we might feel (v. tr.) tomorrow.

* Incidentally, here's a comparable graphic from the National Safety Council (U.S.), of positively Tuftean clarity and elegance, posted by Bruce "Schneier on Security" Schneier: