Virtual A Think & A Drink: Designs for Different Futures

“We need to break the monopoly various state technocrats have over the production of truth,” says architect and activist Eyal Weizman. “But at the site of the ruin of that old established institutional conception of truth, something else needs to grow. The question is what that is.”

“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.

“An accessible world is one that shifts the burden off of disabled people,” says Aimi Hamraie, director of the Critical Design Lab, “and also asks what the user experience of all these new technologies is, and who are they potentially harming.” Here, curator Michelle Millar Fisher speaks with Hamraie and fashion model and activist Jillian Mercado about how designers can imagine accessible futures even as people with disabilities are “surviving apocalypses that are happening in the present.”

“[…] 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.

Expand your understanding of design with the Insights Design Lecture Series, presenting five leading designers from around the country. This year’s program takes advantage of our current digital reality with a few experimental formats, including pre-recorded designer-created videos and live-mixed multimedia Zoom events. The lineup includes LA multidisciplinarian Daniel DeSure, hyper-aesthete Hassan Rahim, information artist and biohacker Heather Dewey-Hagborg in conversation with Chelsea Manning, and Bon Iver collaborators and artists Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson.

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.

By 2080, there will be more metal ore above the surface of the Earth than below. This was the starting point for Formafantasma’s Ore Streams, a project exploring the complicated relationships between large electronic companies, designers, and consumers when seeking to understand the increasingly abstract systems of production that result in enormous amounts of e-waste.

How does our understanding of our own products affect the way we perceive time? Through the skilled craftsmanship of traditional footwear design, Helen Kirkum creates bespoke sneaker collages, combining pieces of discarded and recycled shoes to evoke "fossils of people's lives." Her work has been highly influential on the reworn/patchwork aesthetic currently prevalent in the sneaker industry. 

“The challenge for design,” according to curator and museum director Zoë Ryan, “is to recognize market forces and political constraints while maintaining enough distance to foster the imagination and allow critical positions that can reorganize and rethink economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups using the languages, forms, and methods of design.” Here, Ryan pursues this idea through the vital work of designers Dunne & Raby, Mary Maggic, and Forensic Architecture.

As the founder of MIT’s Space Enabled research group, Danielle Wood is committed to advancing justice here on Earth through space-related design and technologies. Here she offers a roadmap for imagining new cosmic futures, deeply informed by histories of unjust human colonialism and unequal access to technology.

David Kirby on how designers, scientists, and filmmakers collaborate to create “diegetic prototypes”—future technologies that exist within speculative worlds such as science fiction films—and the counterintuitive need to create open-ended narratives to successfully convey scientific truths in today’s post-consensus reality.

What do our collective images of the future tell us about our priorities in the present? How do we design visions of the future intended to defuse other, more perilous futures? Published on the occasion of the exhibition Designs for Different Futures, this essay by designer, curator, and museum director Andrew Blauvelt examines the momentous game of catch-up that humanity must play in order to survive its own conceptions of the future.