Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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3.3.1 Futurecraft
Carlo Ratti & Matthew Claudel
Futurecraft “The natural sciences are concerned with how things are... Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artefacts to attain goals... Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Herbert Simon, “The Science of Design” 1988) Design is concerned with how things ought to be, according to Herbert Simon, Albert Einstein and many others. As it changes existing situations into preferred ones, the act of design is inherently future-facing, aiming to transform the present by effecting material or experiential change. And if design is future-focused, its question becomes: how to accelerate transformation of the present? How to fast-forward the development of tomorrow? In the past, these very questions have driven many avant garde movements – from the Russian Constructivists to Le Corbusier’s modernist utopia to Superstudio’s critical modernist dystopia - brandishing manifestos and painting visions of the future. A vibrant strain of architecture has always dealt with the world of tomorrow... And yet those tomorrows, in many cases, did not come to pass. Our cities are not ‘radieuse.’ However potent, architectural manifestos are rhetorical dreams: wilful, top-down and monolithic. A single vision cannot encompass the profoundly heterogeneous reality of our interconnected and inconsistent societies. Would the outcome be different if the design and evaluation process were integrally plural? Ultimately, a critical mass of public participation may be the deciding factor in accelerating our most desirable future. Even in the (ego-driven) field of architecture, tomorrow will not be built by singular designers. Yet this plot twist is not the death of the designer; in fact, he assumes an increasingly vital responsibility. Designers must challenge what exists today, introduce new and alternate possibilities, and ultimately pave the way toward a desirable future. This is not dissimilar to the conceptual framework of ‘speculative design’ – proposed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art – a process that neither attempts to solve problems nor predict the future. Rather, they understand design as a “catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality,” speculating on how things could be. Even earlier, Buckminster Fuller’s Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) was a systematic approach to design, “to solve problems by introducing into the environment new artefacts, the availability of which will induce their spontaneous employment by humans and thus, coincidentally, cause humans Figure 1 - DWP is an interactive structures made of digitally-controlled water curtains, built at the entrance of the 2008 EXPO in Zaragoza. 2
to abandon their previous problem-producing behaviours and devices.” He believed that design could pull society into a brighter future (or, to put it in a slightly haughtier way, “I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.”) However, the designer must not only peddle abstract ideas. Crucially, the work must be made tangible – not necessarily fully functional products and systems, but demonstrable concepts that promote interaction and debate. The momentum of the crowd can project ideas into the future and spark development; as a result, our work is meaningless unless it ignites imaginations. At the urban scale, this implicates any and every citizen. Living in space and creating space can go hand in hand. A system does not need to be fully developed, deployed, and succeed/fail – if it is tested, we can collectively adjudicate its desirability before wasting resources, ultimately accelerating the future. The goal of design is to generate alternatives and open up new possibilities. Broadly speaking, this frames design as evolutionary – that beneficial changes will steer development in a positive way.
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In fact, biological species do essentially the same thing, on an extraordinarily long time line. Random mutations are introduced from one organism to the next, and if the mutation is successful, that organism will be more likely to reproduce. The best changes are incorporated into the species, and, over time, it evolves. In a seminal 1863 text, Darwin Among the Machines, Samuel Butler proposed this basic analogy, replacing “organisms” with “artefacts” and allowing for the synthetic kingdom to be classified into genera and species, an evolutionary tree of objects. Continuing the analogy, the designer becomes what, in biology, is referred to as a ‘mutagen’ – an agent that produces mutations. Specific design artefacts improve function or enable a new process, and on a broad scale, collectively drive change and development in the synthetic world. This, we call “Futurecraft.” In this evolutionary framework, an argument could be made that a designer’s impact is proportional to his visibility – yet the bottom line is still collective momentum. In much the same way as the open source community, talented actors can garner visibility and followers, as their work is evaluated, shared and reinforced. The best design goes viral. The process that functions almost as ‘natural selection,’ and allows us to we can collectively steer broader technological development toward the most desirable future. As with natural evolution, not all mutations are ideal – or even positive. Some may test dystopian futures, enabling us to acknowledge and preclude negative outcomes. In the digital world this is known as ‘white hat hacking’ – (using and acknowledging negative or dangerous ideas to steer our course in the opposite direction). While natural mutations are random, we, as designers, have the luxury of applying such techniques as ‘futurecasting:’ extrapolating from the present to intentionally explore specific scenarios. We work within a loosely defined ‘near future’ within the spectrum of possibility, as a logical extension of the present. Design in this arena is immediate, with potential to reflexively influence urban evolution today. Of course the work must be insightful, novel and provocative, but their impact hinges on applying them to the world as-it-is – ideas cannot be so extraordinary as to be irrelevant. Ultimately, ideas may or may not be realized, but by virtue of being stated, explored, and debated, a concept will necessarily have made an impact. Provocation is a better metric than certainty, for ideas both positive and negative. This is the triumph of failed design: each proposal influences the evolution and resolution of tomorrow. Designers introduce visions of a possible future – implicating the crowd in Futurecraft. Figure 2 FFD, designed for Milan EXPO 2015, explores how digital technology can change the way that people interact with food.
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