The Future as a Design Problem (original) (raw)
Introduction All designers have to grapple with the unknowability of the future. Objects that are designed here and now will come into use at some future under conditions their creator can neither know nor control. 1 This problem is a special case of a common predicament for human social organization: Every action in the present is also a movement into a future that it helps shape but cannot determine. In many instances, such uncertainty is bounded by the limited scale of the action and the constraints of formal rules and informal norms that structure social action. However, even the most mundane of acts can unravel if expected outcomes are not met. Garfinkel's ethnomethodological " breaching experiments " demonstrate how quickly social organization disintegrates if assumptions about the stability of the consequences of actions are challenged. 2 In cases that designers address, there may be important opportunity costs if expectations are disappointed and the legitimacy of a design is questioned. Individuals, organizations, and nations may all have made significant commitments of material or symbolic resources that could have been applied to other objectives that might have been more productive. Human societies have traditionally developed institutions to try to manage this risk and stabilize (if not control) their future. These range from oracles through insurance to the contemporary fashion for economic modeling. Through such means, the future may be collectively grasped in order to act upon it. Only once the future is stabilized can the designer begin their work to exploit it. However, studies of design have only occasionally addressed this relationship with futures: for example, in urban planning design 3 or in formal anticipatory models of abstract design reasoning. 4 This article explores the recruitment of the future into design practice and the ways this constrains and shapes what could or should be designed and its relations to retrospective evaluations of what should have been designed. Ubiquitous computing (or " ubicomp ") is used as a case study. This is an influential and strongly future-oriented design program—a characteristic that is apparent in the technical and popular literature. 5 As such ubicomp provides an exemplary site to investigate the effects of different strategies for stabilizing the future, while also speaking to a much broader category of socio-technical design practices. We distinguish two intertwined approaches: pragmatic projection, which tries to tie the future to the past, and grand vision, which ties the present to the future. We assess their implications and conclude by arguing that the social legitimacy of design futures should be increasingly integral to their construction.
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