Memories from the Year 2030

“I think if we single out the city as a constellation of lives and people, then we go far beyond the idea of rationalism or aesthetics to reach the poetry that lies in what a city is,” says design theorist and filmmaker Alexandra Midal. Here Midal speaks with Michelle Millar Fisher about the city as an eternal trope for the design imagination.

“[…] small, local, open, connected. These four adjectives work well in defining this scenario because they generate a holistic vision of how society could be,” says renowned social innovation expert Ezio Manzini. “At the same time, they are also readily comprehensible, since everybody easily understands their meaning and implications by looking at the prototypes and the transformative normality on which they are based.”

“Architects and designers are facing a new problem when they aspire to build for a habitable planet,” says renowned theorist Bruno Latour. “They have to answer a new question, because what used to be a poor joke—‘My dear fellow, you seem to live on another planet’—has become literal—‘Yes, we do intend to live on a different planet!’” In this essay Latour maps out a solar system of influences filled with seven fictional planets, exploring the disconnect between the physical lands we inhabit and the geopolitical territories that determine our freedom and agency.

There is a “dilemma uniting artists and many of today’s workers,” writes Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future: “flexibility and freedom on the one hand, precariousness and instability on the other. … Herein lies an opportunity for a new kind of solidarity.” In this article, Gorbis lays out a case for the necessity of art when imagining new, equitable futures, and introduces the Institute’s expanded concept of Universal Basic Assets.

To celebrate the season of love we present this article by philosopher Srećko Horvat, who imagines a future in which romance is susceptible to the same algorithmic manipulations as our voting habits. Join him in connecting the dots between sex robot brothels, Cambridge Analytica, and dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr, and Facebook Dating.