Remembering the Future

remembering

the

future

the designer as ethnographer of imagination

lana z porteR

PREFACE

3

royal college of art design interactions october 2013 10040

table

OF

Figures

i

PREFACE

ii

introduction

1

contents

I. backwards

7

Remembering Good

8

Remembering Well

10

Constructing Memories

16

II. forwards

19

Possibility

20

Imagination

24

iii. FORTH AND BACK 29 Remembering the Future

30

Memento Futuri

32

CONCLUSION

39

BIBLIOGRAPHY

44

Books

45

Articles

47

Chapters

49

Speeches

50

Conversations

51

APPENDIX

52

Conversation with Dr. Kosslyn

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Conversation with Dr. Bar

55

i

FIGURES

FIGURE 1

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“Series of Nows” by the author (2013)

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 5

25

“Breakfast Table Test,” Francis Galton (1880)

12

figure 6

28

“Persuasive story pattern,” adapted from Nancy Duarte (2012) by the author

FIGURE 3

figure 7

“Floating Signifier,” by the author (2012)

FIGURE 4

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“Manufactured Geology” by Yesenia Thibault-Picazo (2012)

23

“Futures Cone.” Ann-Kristina Simon, adapted via Stuart Candy from Hancock and Bezold (1994)

figure 8

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“New Mumbai,” by Tobias Revell (2012)

The “Madeleine,” in Scent-ography

by Amy Radcliffe (2012)

15

figure 9

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“Authenticity” by Amy Radcliffe (2012)

figure 10 “Now and Then” by the author (2013)

43

ii

preface

PREFACE

When I moved to London, I felt like... oh my god, what am I doing here?

Because I was totally alone, and I didn't speak very well in that time, and I didn't have friends, I didn't have people to support me. And it was very very painful, in the beginning.

- a Brazilian in London

iii

Here, very fast, everything.

My country is... slowly.

[I miss] sun. The food. My job.

I did ceramics. Here now I’m cleaning. It’s very hard, I don’t like it.

My heart. I’m sometimes... sad. Too much... lonely... alone. And very bad I don’t speak English. This... big problem.

- a Hungarian in London

It’s an empty feeling. It’s a Sunday night feeling. It’s like the dark roads leading away from school... the kind of pit feeling. ...It’s like a dislocation, I guess, from where you want to be.

It’s a complete dislocation from a person and a place you know.

- a Londoner in London

PREFACE

iv

Homesickness is a longing for the familiar when reality feels unknown. It is a form of nostalgia that arises when the people, places, and routines that we know disappear, or become distant, usually because of a dislocation or loss. And though it is hard to put to words what homesickness feels like, everyone has experienced it in one form or another.

I am an American in London, and an anthropologist in design school. My experience and negotiation of these two facts has influenced my practice at the Royal College of Art, and my research interests in writing this essay. It has induced within me a form of homesickness that challenges my understanding of identity, place and time, and anthropology and design. What makes homesickness of particular interest to me is that, in my experience, it is not caused simply by an unfamiliar present, but also by an unfamiliar future. It is a longing not just for a place where we felt at home, but for a path toward a future in which we might find a home. In thinking about the future and the possibilities it may hold, the parallels to speculative design become clear. What will the future be like? Will it be good, or bad? What will our lives be like?

When the distance between what we know and what we don’t know grows too great, we search for strategies that will help us make sense of the world. We build a scaffold that supports a vision of the world that we can understand, whether that world is in our past, or the dream of a distant future. Indeed, the gaps between back then and now, and now and then, are what prompt the speculative designer to ask questions about the future of society, and imagine possible answers. Through the creation of scenarios, objects, experiences, and interactions, the speculative designer attempts to narrow the cognitive distance between reality and a possible future, and in doing so, perhaps helps us find a path “home.�

Speculative design has given me a set of tools for thinking about and acting on the future, and provided a framework through which to develop my own ideas about the role of imagination in coping with

PREFACE

v

uncertainty. It has prompted me to develop a methodology for thinking about how we might use our imaginative capabilities to establish cognitive, physical, and sensory connections between reality and possible futures. Finding ourselves in these awkward or overwhelming situations in the gaps between the past, present, and future, between what we know and what we don’t know, allows us to transition from becoming to being. That is when we change. I know I have.

“More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. Home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.”

- Pico Iyer

1

introductioN

introduction

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In a six-minute lecture in 2009, psychologist Philip Zimbardo explained “the secret power of time.” Our orientation toward time, he said, determines the way we make decisions: whether we evaluate a situation based on how we remember it (past-oriented), how we feel about it in the moment (present-oriented), or how we think it will impact us down the line (future oriented). Within each of these three distinctive temporal models, there are two sub-modes that speak to whether the model is positive or negative, hedonist or fatalist, goal-oriented or transcendental, respectively, and it is the particular mix of these time perspectives within ourselves that defines who we are and the course we take in life.1

It sounds simple. And it is... sort of. Time is a given, something with which we will always have to contend.

And especially now, in the post-industrial age, we recognize time as an important resource, one that we should not waste. Time is finite. Time is money.

Even so, time can just be time, in the Zimbardian sense. I woke up this morning, having watched Zimbardo’s lecture before bed, thinking about my temporal orientation. As I washed dishes in preparation for my daily oatmeal, the grayish white light of a gloomy London day poured in through the window, and my soapy hands burned under a steamy stream of near-scalding hot water. In that moment, I felt a wave of familiar emotion: a feeling of comfort and relief. A memory had been recalled.

You know that feeling when it’s kind of cool outside, a little windy, gray, and you’ve just been in the lake, maybe waterskiing, and you see steam rising from the outdoor jacuzzi at your friend’s house, and your lips are purple and you think you’ll never be warm again, but you climb in and the water’s wonderfully painfully hot and someone just turned on the jets and you feel so relieved that you never want to get out?

All that from doing dishes on a shitty London morning.

1

Zimbardo, Philip, “The Psychology of Time,” (TED2009, February 2009), accessed May 20, 2013. http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_ prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html.

introduction

3

“Nostalgic time,” writes Svetlana Boym, “is that time-out-of-time of daydreaming and longing that jeopardizes one’s timetable and work ethic....”2 Not only does nostalgia take us away from time, it is a form of dreaming, of imagination, that pieces together memories from and fantasies of a past that probably never was. We imagine things were better than they were, and we overlook evidence to the contrary. Nostalgia is, as Boym writes, “...the disease of an afflicted imagination.”3 Because that time in the jacuzzi by the lake was also when a group of girls, all of us about 12 or 13 years old, told me that I should maybe think about plucking my eyebrows because they were kind of shaped funny and it might help me look less... weird. So when I went home that day, I searched the bathroom drawers until I found the pair of tweezers we kept on hand in case of splinters and began the painful process of follicular maintenance that I’ve had to keep up ever since.

But boy that hot water felt good.

I often find myself jolted out of the present and into the past, usually by some sensory trigger like the smell of old vegetables in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator or pretty much any song with a banjo or the slightly pleasurable but musty stench of pine when it’s wet. As Proust told us, our senses, particularly our sense of smell, have the incredible capacity to stir within us vivid emotional memories. This is all to say that I suppose I was destined to be nostalgic. Zimbardo calls it past-positive.

The specificity of the past battles against the uncertainty of the future. We take comfort in those details that make up our images of the past, albethey fictional or embellished, because they feel knowable.

They just come to you, like breadcrumbs leading us backwards on a path to remembering. The future doesn’t provide us with these Hansel and Gretel- style breadcrumbs. In fact, it gives us close to nothing.

How can we create something out of nothing? How can we make decisions that positively affect the future, when the future is unknown? If we want to create change, we have to take what we know, what we knew, and what we want, and envision ourselves in a scenario in which we have that thing that we wanted, and then some. In other words, we have to imagine it.

The people who know what they want are what Zimbardo calls future-goal-oriented. This is a positive time perspective that indicates an ability to resist present-tense temptation and imagine the possible

2 3

Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001), xix.

Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 4.

introduction

4

benefits of taking a few extra steps before the big payoff: the achievement of a goal. Often, the big payoff is nothing more than a fantasy — the metaphorical dangling carrot — but it is the belief that a big payoff is possible that motivates the future-goal-oriented individual to take a particular course of action.

The field of speculative design takes advantage of the uniquely human awareness of our continued existence in time. This ‘self-knowing’ (or autonoetic consciousness) primes us to engage in ‘mental time travel,’ which allows us “to mentally project [ourselves] backwards in time to re-live, or forwards to prelive, events.”4 Speculative design relies on the audience’s ability to come along for a ride: to follow the designer’s trail of logic to a particular vision of the future, aided by his or her creation of objects, images, experiences, or interactions that help fill in some of the mental gaps. These are the breadcrumbs that, like those sensory triggers that can catapult us into the nostalgic past, make the expansive future feel a little more real to someone who has never experienced it. Just as the nostalgic looks backward at a detailed imaginative history, the speculative designer must look forward at a detailed imaginative future.

If I take design to be the imagination and articulation of possibilities for change, the future as the temporal frame of possibility, and ethnography as the method by which we derive meaning from our experiences, then a design anthropology for the future can be a way of making, and making sense of, imagined possibilities. The burgeoning field of design anthropology combines the interpretive process of ethnography and the inventive process of design to address the ever-present gaps that exist between the producer and the consumer, and the consumer and the produced.5 Ethnography, a methodology for facilitating structured interactions with individuals and communities in context, seeks to understand and disentangle the “webs of significance” that people spin to make meaning of their world.6 Design, on the other hand, writes Joachim Halse, “...performs a distance between the here and now and the there and then and then positions itself as a transcending capacity.”7 By being an act of creation, design always proposes a “there” by articulating a new possibility for form or function. “...Design anthropological work,” Halse says, “is about creating liminal spaces for critically engaging with lived life, i.e., the practicalities of everyday use, while simultaneously exploring how this practice might be different.”8

4

5 6 7

Suddendorf, Thomas and Michael C. Corballis, “The evolution of foresight: What is mental travel, and is it unique to humans?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30, no. 3 (June 2007): 299.

Donovan, Jared and Wendy Gunn, Design and Anthropology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012): 1.

Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.

Halse, Joachim, “Design Anthropology: Borderland Experiments with Participation, Performance and Situated Intervention” (phD Diss,. IT University of Copenhagen, 2008), 199.

introduction

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Ethnography, as the act of deriving meaning from and “thickly describing” lived life,9 becomes a version of design when ‘lived life’ shifts from being an embodied experience in the present to an imagined experience in the future. I propose a form of design anthropology in which the designer is an ethnographer of imagination, enabling reflective yet proactive encounters with possible futures.

To create any kind of change in the world, one must be able to imagine new alternatives. Every day, we engage in mental time travel that gives us a glimpse of what the future could hold. But often those visions are fragmented, restricted by the boundaries of our own perception or the gravitational pull toward what’s merely probable. As designers, we are charged with releasing the imagination of others by articulating — and attempting to make real — possibilities for change. Because while “our images, dreams, projections, calculations, and prophesies may give form and substance to the beyond, ...they destroy it; for, as they construct it, they assure its displacement.”10 Unlike nostalgia, which replaces the real with the imaginary, the future will inevitably replace the imaginary with the real. If that moment when the future becomes the now arrives and we’ve only readied ourselves for the probable, nothing would ever really change.

This essay seeks to investigate/instigate imagination as a tool for future speculation and social change.

Borrowing insights from the fields of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and design, I will examine the physical, emotional, and creative processes that are at play when we think about our pasts and our futures. Part I deconstructs why memory matters for future thinking, exploring what we can learn from the way we access the past to construct more “memorable” futures. Part II looks at our strategies for anticipating and imagining the future, from goal-oriented behaviors and the creation of “possible selves” to the importance of hope and mental imagery in motivating action. Finally, Part III reveals how we can connect with possible futures through memory, and offers a set of techniques for enhancing, accessing, and acting on those imagined futures.

8 9 10

Halse, “Design Anthropology,” 22.

Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 5-6, 9-10.

Crapanzano, Vincent, Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 14.

introduction

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FIG. 1 The present is a series of “nows,” the future a distant “then.” The act of imagination allows us to interact with a “then,” which we synthesize and reincorporate into a new “now.” Designers usually deal with the act of imagination, while the ethnographer aims to synthesize and make sense of our images of the future.

DESIGN

IMAGINATION

NOW1

ETHNOGRAPHY

NOW2

NOW3

NOW4

NOW5

...

THEN1

SYNTHESIS

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Part 1 BACKWARDS

backwards

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remembering good

A 17th-century soldier, far from home with nothing but a suitcase and his thoughts, was among the first to fall ill. He was diagnosed by a young Swiss doctor, Johaness Hofer, “who attributed [the soldier’s] mental and physical maladies to [his] longing to return home — nostos in Greek, and the accompanying pain, algos.”11 For a long time, nostalgia was considered an affliction, a burden of the past-oriented. It produced weepy soldiers and unassimilated immigrants, daydreaming laborers and technophobic (grand)parents.

Of course, there were sufferers of nostalgia long before there were medical doctors to make diagnoses — like Odysseus, whose desperation to return home guided him back to the shores of Ithaca after 10 years at sea.

Nostalgia is no longer seen as a disease but a distraction. A slight disruption or deviation from reality, nostalgia brings us back to a time that never really was and perhaps never could have been: “Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality.”12 While they may be idealized or even false, nostalgic recollections are comforting. And why shouldn’t they be? In an ever-changing world, we must constantly adapt to new situations, places, people, and objects that challenge our understanding of reality and the way things should work. Nostalgia provides us with narratives that we can hold on to while everything around us moves at breakneck speed. The taste of your mother’s homemade ravioli, the unbreakable trust between you and a childhood friend, the

11

12

Tierney, John, “What is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows,” New York Times, July 8, 2013, accessed July 10, 2013, http://www. nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-quite-a-bit-research-shows.html?pagewanted=all.

Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23.

backwards

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totally epic parties in college, or the smell of pine trees on a summer day — these sensations, legends, moments, and stories are reassurances that everything will be all right, that there are things in this world we can count on. Even if our nostalgic minds take great liberties when we remember, we are happy to accept the rosy version of the story because it makes the world less frightening.

“If you can recruit a memory to maintain psychological comfort, at least subjectively, that could be an amazing and complex adaptation” says Dr. Tim Wildschut, a psychologist at the University of Southampton who studies the benefits of nostalgia. “It could contribute to survival by making you look for food and shelter much longer.”13 Indeed, there is something distinctly good about being able to recall successful or pleasurable life experiences, fragmentary as they may be, when faced with new obstacles. What makes those particular experiences stick in our memory, and how do we access those memories?

13

Tierney, “What is Nostalgia Good For?”

backwards

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remembering WELL

When you ask a cognitive neuroscientist what makes some things stick in memory more than others, you’ll get two answers. The first is novelty.

“Starting at a very early age,” says Dr. Moshe Bar, a neuroscientist and director of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, “the brain is almost wired to look for novel aspects in the environment. When we talk about about a new situation... the mere novelty, regardless of the context, is something that’s very powerful in orienting our attention and affecting subsequent memory.”14 When we experience something new, a confounding of social, contextual, and sensory inputs occurs.

Our brains makes sense of all this by forming analogies to similar things from memory, so when something stretches those analogies, we perk up. Dopamine (the pleasure hormone) is released and our hippocampus (the part of the brain associated with short and long-term memory) comes alive. On top of that, when something appears to be different from anything else we’ve seen before, we spend more time taking it in, which gives us a better chance of remembering it. This is why, when designing for visual impact, combining known elements into something unknown, or something barely recognizable, makes people look longer. Staring is caring.

The second factor that affects how well we remember is emotion, or affect. This is where nostalgia comes in: we have an easier time recalling, and are more willing to recall, experiences that we associate with positive emotions (even if those experiences were not really as positive as we recall). As we have learned, our propensity for positive recollection gives us a selective advantage by conferring the belief that something good can come from something unknown. On the other hand, negative emotions can also influence one’s ability to remember, so much so that one is unable to forget. For sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the emotions associated with incredibly painful or frightening past

14

Bar, Moshe, Skype conversation, Boston-Tel Aviv, August 21, 2013.

backwards

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experiences make it nearly impossible to rid oneself of those memories.

What makes things memorable is distinct from what makes us remember. A traumatic memory is memorable because it is traumatic; it comes to mind not because we want it to, but because it was triggered by something in our environment. Our senses, which act as interfaces between our brains and the outside world, provide a clear pathway to memory. When we see an image or hear a song, our eyes or ears relay the information into our cortexes, where we start to look for analogies to similar things we may have encountered. Memories are what we get when the brain searches for links between what we are experiencing in the present and what we experienced in the past. That’s why the particular combination of hot water and a gloomy sky were enough to send me into a nostalgic reverie about the feeling of being in a hot tub after a cold dip in the lake. Some triggers are known, others unknown, and we encounter them by design, or at random.

It has become widely accepted that our sense of smell is the most powerful in accessing memories.

Marcel Proust’s famous passage in In Search of Lost Time about the involuntary memories triggered by a madeleine cookie has been validated by studies that have found that “the subjective experience of the emotional potency of odor-evoked memory is correlated with specific activation in the amygdala during recall.”15 Another explanation is that the distance that information must travel to get from the external environment into the cerebral cortex is shorter for scent because of the olfactory bulb, which, hidden at the very back of the nasal cavity, connects directly to our cerebral cortex via mitral cell axons.

The discovery that scent can serve as an uninterrupted pathway between past experience and current experience has prompted experiments in making positive memories more integrated into the everyday.

I met Mick Duprey at a summer job at a design consultancy in Boston. Long and lean with tattoos on both forearms and a constant case of bed-head-turned-accidental-faux-hawk, Mick is the kind of guy who says what he thinks, and thinks a lot. Having grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Mick never thought he’d go anywhere, geographically or in life. Day to day, he worked in a deli and played in a band with his friends.

When the opportunity to go to Costa Rica arose in 2006, he didn’t hesitate, and found himself staying in a house on stilts overlooking an alligator-infested lagoon, sharing a room with a hippie named Jessica who was into aroma therapy.

15

Herz et al, “Neuroimaging evidence for the emotional potency of odor-evoked memory,” Neuropsychologia 42, no. 3 (2004): 371.

backwards

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FIG. 2 The “Madeleine,” part of Scentography by Amy Radcliffe (2012).

An analog scent camera that captures and synthesizes odors

backwards

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“It would get really hot out, and I had brought a suitcase with a couple of shirts and a couple of pairs of shorts, and she’s just like ‘You should use this peppermint oil, you should put it on your head every day because it cools you off.’ And we were like, OK, yeah. So you put it on your head, and it kind of tingles. And another thing was that I bought this Burt’s Beeswax insect repellant, which is shit, it doesn’t work at all, but I really liked it because it smelled like citronella. So I’m mixing citronella with this peppermint oil, and then there was this Burt’s Beeswax deodorant that I liked... it had a rosemary, herb...

So this kind of makes me an oddball in a way because everybody else just smells like... punk.

And I’m like I’m going to cover myself in essential oils. So that’s what I did for the summer. And it was kind of necessity: one thing was to make me not stink, one thing was the keep the bugs off, and one thing was to keep my head cool. They were all kind of placebos, none of them really worked, but I liked the way it smelled. Anyway, so you get back home, and it’s been two months since this perfectly awesome experience, and you get back to the deli or whatever, and so you still have all this stuff, and just to remind you of what you were doing, to relax or whatever, you put peppermint oil on your head. I still do to this day put peppermint oil on my head. I did it this morning. Just to kind of get me in that zone.”

Ever since, Mick has been pairing his own scent concoctions with new experiences to pre-meditatively associate those scents with positive memories. He does it, he says, because it’s something that’s just for him, that will only be able to make him feel a certain way. The scents prime him for a certain mindset, one which allows him to hold on tighter to the good memories while making everyday life move a little slower.

“We all move really fast, you know? And I definitely move way too fast, and I don’t take time to appreciate things because I’m just having to think about things all the time. So to me, if it’s like this really fast moving river.... Throwing a sensory experience in there, in the context of this fastmoving thing, becomes in some way sort of this white noise or this sort of din that happens in the background. It’s not something that’s like a Calgon ‘Take Me Away’ moment, it’s not like I put this on and I’m instantly taken back... it’s nothing like that. I think it’s more that maybe adding these disparate elements together will kind of help in that longer more complicated stream of speed that is life. It’s an additive element of goodness, or badness... or whatever.”

backwards

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Memories are embedded in and transmitted by objects just like they are through the senses. Svetlana Boym identifies the souvenir as an emblem of nostalgia, the ultimate “memorabilia.” Indeed, the souvenir is a floating signifier into which the traveler pours his or her memories of a trip, to be recalled with each glance at the object as it sits on the bookshelf or above the fireplace [Figure 3]. We imbue some objects with memories of experiences, while other objects are artifacts and products of experience, forever connected by virtue of having been there at the time. Even the most seemingly insignificant objects can become precious: the toy from the bottom of the cereal box, the empty pack of gum that fell out of your high school sweetheart’s back pocket, the first book you ever loved. These objects gain value as tokens of memory.

The mundane actions, superficial objects, and passing interactions that make up a large part of our lives actually get at something deeper in the human experience. In The Toothpaste of Immortality, Elemér Hankiss writes about the relationship between the “trivialities of everyday life” and the “existential problems of our existence.”16 “...[B]y brushing our teeth with the right brand of toothpaste, we are on the best way to transform ourselves from disintegrated, alien, sleepy biological beings into human persons and citizens with rights and duties.”17 Just as consumer culture bases its brands (and what are brands but trivialities?) on the illusion of some deeper meaning so that we consume them, so too do we embed our versions of the past in the trivial objects that just happen to have been at the right place at the right time. Objectively trivial but subjectively existential, the relics of our past are the containers of our memories, growing deeper every time we peer back into them. It is through these objects that we exercise our constructive powers of remembering.

Our reasons for remembering, from the content of the memories themselves to the sensations and objects that trigger them, provide us with a set of principles with which to design for the future. What is the role of memory in imagining the future, and how can our images of the future become “memorable?”

16 17

Hankiss, Elemér, The Toothpaste of Immortality: Self Construction in the Consumer Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 4.

Hankiss, The Toothpaste of Immortality, 29.

backwards

FIG. 3 “Floating Signifier” by Lana Z Porter (2012). The snow globe souvenir becomes a vessel for nostalgic memories, “filled” with images, sounds, and movies from a trip that play from a small projector

15

backwards

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constructing memories

All memories are constructions. Regardless of a whether a memory is positive or negative, it is never a perfect reconstruction of the past: it’s not like retrieving a file from a hard drive. In part, our faulty memory is a result of our (mis)perception. If you close one eye and and hold your thumb at an arm’s length, the space that your thumb occupies represents two degrees of visual angle, which is what we see in high resolution at full view. It only seems like we can see a lot more because our eyes are always moving.18 Similarly, errors and distortions in memory also arise when we combine incoming information with our previous beliefs. That is, our brains are so actively making analogies to what we have already heard, seen, felt, and experienced, that our pasts get mixed up with everything we encounter in the present. Our emotional and experiential baggage gets in the way of accurate memory recall.19 20 We see this time and time again in the false memories of eye witnesses, the experiences we think we remember but perhaps have only just seen in an image, or the planting of misinformation that leads us to believe in something that may never have happened in the first place.21 22 But just as nostalgia is a mental safety blanket that comforts us in the face of an uncertain and unrelenting world, constructive memory allows us to adapt to future events by recombining and reshuffling details from previous experiences to form mental predictions. The future is, after all, never a reconstruction of the past.

The part of the brain that is responsible for remembering is also responsible in part for imagining the future. In the same paper in which Edwin Tulving introduced the concept of autonoetic consciousness,

18 19

20

21

22

Kosslyn, Stephen M, Skype conversation, Boston-San Francisco, July 15, 2013.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman and Moshe Bar, “See it with Feeling: Affective Predictions during Object Perception,” In Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future, edited by Moshe Bar, 107-121 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2011).

Schacter, Dan, “Constructive memory: Remembering The Past to Imagining The Future” (University of British Columbia Psychology, 5th Annual Quinn Memorial Lecture, Friday, 9 October, 2009), accessed June 25, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bWd0ipgI8k.

Fraser, Scott, “Why eyewitnesses get it wrong,” (TEDxUSC, May 2012, 2012), accessed July 10, 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fraser_the_ problem_with_eyewitness_testimony.html.

Loftus, Elizabeth F, “Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory” Learning Memory 12 (2005): 361-366.

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he tells the story of a patient whose amnesia after a traffic accident prevented him from predicting his future as well as remembering his past. “[K.C.] lives in a timeless world, that is, in a permanent present. When he is asked to try to ‘travel back in time’ in his own mind, back either a few minutes or many years, he says he cannot do it.

When he is asked to describe the state of his mind when he tries to turn his mind’s eye toward the past, the best he can do is to say that it is ‘blank.’ Nor can he think about the future. ...When he is asked to describe the state of his mind when he thinks about the future, whether the next fifteen minutes or the next year, he again says that it is blank. Indeed, when asked to compare the two kinds of blankness, one of the past and the other of the future, he says that they are ‘the same kind of blankness.’ Thus K.C. seems to be as incapable of imagining his future as he is of remembering his past.”23 Through the case of K.C., it became clear that the underlying structures governing both memory and prospection overlap. Neuroimaging studies have since confirmed that there is similar brain activity in the hippocampus when we think about past and future events.24 25 This is why memory is constructive: to allow the brain, through the act of constructing, to “piece together” elements from the past in order to imagine possible futures.26 Can we access imagined futures the way we access memories? Will we be able to regard possible futures with the same familiarity with which we regard the past?

When we endeavor to imagine the future, we are often faced with something akin to K.C.’s “blankness.”

Anything we say about it feels like mere conjecture — an educated guess and not much better. But if we all knew just how fragmentary our own memories were, perhaps we would be more likely to try.

Perhaps if we knew that the details of our pasts have been twisted, pushed, pulled, and kneaded by our own minds, and if we could understand the subtleties of those gestures, we would try our hand at

23

24

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26

Tulving Endel, “The origin of autonoesis in episodic memory.” In The Nature of Remembering: Essays in Honor of Robert G. Crowder, edited by HL Roediger, JS Nairne, I Neath, AM Suprenant, 17–34 (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001): 23-24.

Addis, Donna Rose, Alana T. Wong, Daniel L. Schacter, “Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration,” Neuropsychologia 45, no. 7 (2007): 1363-1377.

Hassabis, Demis and Eleanor A. Maguire, “Deconstructing episodic memory with construction,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 7 (July 2007): 299-306.

McDermott, Kathleen, Karl K. Szpunar, Katheen M. Arnold, “Similarities in Episodic Future Thought and Remembering: The Importance of Contextual Setting” In Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future, edited by Moshe Bar, 83-94 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 89.

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molding our own visions. We all project ourselves into the future; after all, we are one of the few — if not the only — animals even capable of engaging in mental time travel. But our projections are often held back by our beliefs and attitudes, fears of being wrong, or our limited exposure to alternative possibilities. Sometimes our imaginations are set free by someone who does the imagining on our behalf. In the next chapter, I will discuss how we manage possibility in everyday life, and how possibility leads us to imagination.

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possibilitY

We are all futurists. Every day, we are faced with possibilities that prompt us to ask ourselves “what if?”

To answer this question, we try to anticipate what could happen, we form “if-then” scenarios that give us license to experiment with possible courses of action and contemplate possible outcomes. We create possible selves that embody our goals, fears, inklings, and fantasies, and these possible selves serve as the bridge between the present and future self. Most importantly, possible selves remind us that the present self can change. “...Possible selves matter not only because they focus attention on the future,” write Daphne Oyserman and Leah James, “but also because they link vivid images of oneself in a future state to current action that can be taken to move toward positive and away from negative future selves.”27 Even if the desired outcome is positive (as it usually is), we often imagine negative possible selves that help keep us on the path to getting what we want. As such, possible selves are categorized by whether they are positive or negative (valence), by their probability of occurring (likelihood), and by how near or far in the future they are (proximal or distal). Oyserman and James continue: “For proximal possible selves to matter, they need to cue action in the present. For distal possible selves to matter, action in the present needs to be linked to outcomes in the future via more proximal possible selves that can serve as evidence that progress is being made and as markers for whether current effort is sufficient, needs to be increased, or plans of action need to be revised for the distal possible self to be attained.”28 Proximal possible selves lead us like breadcrumbs from a known present to a distal possible future. In the short term, proximal possible selves helps us evaluate choices and make decisions, and in the long

27

28

Oyserman, Daphne and Leah James, “Possible Selves: From Content to Process” In Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, edited by Keith Markman, William Klein, and Julie Suhr, 373-394 (New York, NY: Psychology Press, 2009), 383.

Oyserman, Daphne and Leah James, “Possible Selves: From Content to Process,” 383.

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term, distal possible selves help us set goals and motivate us to take the necessary steps to achieve them. Possible selves are a reflection of our attitude toward change: the more willing we are to believe that change is possible, the wider range of possible selves we will have at our disposal.

“Possible selves can facilitate optimism and belief that change is possible because they provide a sense that the current self is mutable.”29 When one is optimistic, it is easier to choose the possible over the probable. The most likely future scenario is hardly ever the most favorable one, but when we favor the unlikely scenario, the optimistic part of ourselves gives us hope that it is possible. Optimism and possibility go hand in hand.

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism,” said Vaclav Havel. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”30 Hope is a kind of horizon that is unreachable but all-encompassing, a there without a there yet.31 Optimism, on the other hand, is an attitude, formed through experience and based on some kind of evidence. If one is optimistic, there’s usually a reason. Hope escapes reason by externalizing agency, relinquishing control to something greater that exists irrespective of the self. Hope, too, can be a way of expanding one’s repertoire of possible selves by taking the onus off of the proximal possible self and placing it in the hands of distal possible selves.

Too much or too little hope fosters inaction. Being overly hopeful places so much of the responsibility for attainment on the Other that the individual becomes merely a spectator. In psychology, hopelessness is defined as “depressive predictive certainty, the point at which dreaded future events are treated as certain to occur or desired future events as certain not to occur.”32 Someone without hope is futureoriented in the worst possible way: not only does he resign himself to whatever the future holds, but he also is sure that what the future holds is bad.

Speculative design creates possible selves and possible worlds that also contain a positive or negative valence, a likelihood, and temporality. The designer manipulates these variables to create scenarios that invite audiences to formulate new possible selves in the context of this new future. Some scenarios

29 30 31 32

Oyserman, Daphne and Leah James, “Possible Selves: From Content to Process,” 376.

Deneen, Patrick J, “Hope and Despair.” Social Research 66, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 181.

Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons, 104.

Andersen, Susan M., Lisa A. Spielman, John A. Bargh, “Future-Event Schemas and Certainty about the Future: Automaticity in Depressives’ FutureEvent Predictions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63, no. 5 (1992): 711.

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require greater leaps than others, and some provide more breadcrumbs along the way.

A scatterplot in the 2010 “Design Interactions” catalog provides a framework for viewing the future not as a single, amorphous concept, but as a continuum of possibility onto which speculative design projects can be mapped and consequently understood. On the x-axis is Time, spanning from the present into an exponentially distant future, and on the y-axis are four words: possible, plausible, probable, preferable [Figure 4].

The y-axis represents the “valence” and “likelihood” categories of an imagined future scenario; it helps the audience line up an array of possible selves that are either optimistic or pessimistic, likely or unlikely, depending on the designer’s vision. For the speculative designer, the “valence” category — or whether an imagined future is good or bad — can be problematic. Certainly, one must be cautious about using terms like utopian or dystopian in describing one’s work; while they are helpful terms-to-think-with and a quick way of capturing whether a possible world is distinctly positive or negative, they carry a lot of social and theoretical baggage that can distract from the real purpose of the work.

I am careful not to use the word “utopian” to describe my intentions in this essay. I prefer to use “hopeful.” In his Theology of Hope, Jurgen Moltmann writes, “Hope and the kind of thinking that goes with it consequently cannot submit to the reproach of being utopian, for they do not strive after things that have ‘no place’ but after things that have ‘no place as yet’ but can acquire one.”33 Speculative designers can afford to be hopeful, because the amorphous Other to which they ascribe agency is you, the audience, and the ‘no place as yet’ is your imagination.

33

Moltmann, Jürgen, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (London, UK: SCM Press, London, 1967), 25.

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FIG. 4 “Futures Cone.”

Ann-Kristina Simon, adapted via Stuart Candy from Hancock and Bezold (1994)

POSSIBLE

PLAUSIBLE

PREFERABLE

PROBABLE

NOW

Adapted via Stuart Candy from Hancock and Bezold (1994)

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imagination

Imagination is the mental articulation of possibility. It allows us to see things that aren’t real and experience things we could never otherwise experience. More importantly, it allows us to look beyond the present. Imagination transcends temporality. “...[The] imagination is much more than a faculty for evoking images which double the world of our direct perceptions: it is a distancing power thanks to which we represent to ourselves distant objects and we distance ourselves from present realities.”34 In Imaginative Horizons, Vincent Crapanzano posits that the value of imagination is in its creation of a horizon, or as Moltmann would say, a ‘no place as yet.‘ The horizon is Crapanzano’s escape from time and space, a direction in which to run that distances us from the here and now. “It is this realm that gives us an edge,” he writes.35 With our imagination, we can creatively combine everything in our memory and everything in our immediate reality to experience the unknown. With imagination we can outrun the real.

Our ability to imagine depends on our capacity to create mental images, and we create mental images in the same way that we make sense of new experiences: through analogy. Any form of imagination necessarily starts within the boundaries of one’s own experience. We formulate a description in our minds that is used to access visual memories, or what we’ve seen before. Then what happens is up to you. You can imagine in parts, building up images piece by piece by analogy, or start with a whole image and make adjustments from there. If I were to imagine my ideal apartment, for example, I might start by amassing a mental collection of parts — furniture, architectural styles and ornaments, art for the walls, materials — and then put them together. Following a different approach, I could imagine Monica and Rachel’s apartment from the television sitcom Friends and then start modifying: mentally repainting the walls, expanding the size of the closet, or adding a second bathroom. But the basic building blocks of imagination are

34 35

Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons, 19.

Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons, 14.

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1. DEFINITION Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness comparable to that of the actual scene?

2. COLOURING Are all the objects pretty well defined at the same time, or is the place of sharpest definition at any one moment more contracted than it is in a real scene?

3. ILLUMINATION Are the colours of the china, of the toast, bread-crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and natural?�

FIG. 5

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memories; that’s why they are constructive. Constructing the past primes the brain to construct the future.

“Mental imagery not only allows us to predict the imminent or distant future, but also to consider many possible futures — or even many possible worlds.”36 The vividness with which we can imagine possible futures or possible worlds depends on our exposure to imagery and other sensory, social, or contextual information. In addition to the raw materials we have stored in memory, imagination also depends on our natural propensity for creating mental images.

In 1880, Francis Galton, cousin of Sir Charles Darwin, discovered the variability in quality and use of mental imagery by conducting a simple exercise that is now known as the Breakfast Table Test.37 He asked people to visualize what they had eaten for breakfast that morning, giving them a range of criteria to consider [Figure 5].

The responses were all over the map. From Galton and subsequent studies, we know that there are multiple kinds of mental imagery, and that some people use mental imagery more effectively than others. Fortunately, one can improve imagination and mental imagery simply through practice. But even if our own imagination falls short, there are usually other ways to gain inspiration from people willing to do the initial imagining for us.

The people who change the world often have big imaginations, and usually possess a special ability to kindle imagination in others. On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C..

At the beginning of the speech, he talked about the past, about the long history of racial injustice in America. Then, he spoke about the present. “America has given the Negro people a bad check,” he said, “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ...No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”38 He spoke as though he were giving a sermon, with colorful metaphors, visual imagery, and repetition. When he had set the scene of present-day injustice, he moved on to talk about the future:

36

37 38

Moulton, Samiel T. and Stephen M. Kosslyn, “Imagining predictions: mental imagery as mental emulation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 364, no. 1521 (March 2009): 1274.

Galton, Francis, “Statistics of Mental Imagery,” Mind 5 (1880): 301-318.

King, Martin Luther, “I Have a Dream...” (March on Washington, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963), accessed August 23, 2013, http://www.archives. gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf.

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“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ ...I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”39 This is how things could be, he was saying. Imagine this. Just imagine it. As he continued to talk, he leapt back and forth between the present and the future, prejudice and acceptance, today and a possible tomorrow. And his audience was convinced. Dr. King’s speech is considered one of the greatest of our time not only because it was a defining moment of the civil rights movement in America, but because of the speech itself: its structure, its cadence, its use of language and meter. Its use of descriptive analogies left his listeners with the breadcrumbs of a future that they could envision themselves while giving them hope that achieving it was possible. This was a future — a there — that made perfect sense, a future for which the audience had every reason to hope.

Nancy Duarte, writer and principle of Duarte Design, performed content analysis on some of the most memorable speeches in history and found that there were surprising similarities between them.40 Like Dr. King, other great speakers, including Steve Jobs, start by creating a picture of the present: this is how things are today. Then, they jump into the future: this is how things could be. Duarte found that, throughout the rest of the speech, the speakers would move back and forth between the now and the then [Figure 6], expanding and enriching the audience’s mental images of a possible future that was within reach if only they could just imagine.

Whether our imagination originates from the vivid metaphors of a great orator or the seemingly meaningless mind-wanderings that occur while waiting at the bus stop, the very act of imagining brings it one step closer to becoming real. Imagination motivates action. The designer is responsible for guiding our imaginations away from the probable and toward the possible by conjuring mental images whose brightness and clarity make even the strangest of scenarios make sense.

In the next chapter, I will close the gap between memory, imagination, and action, as well as define and suggest possible roles for the designer as ethnographer of imagination.

39 40

King, “I Have a Dream.”

Duarte, Nancy, “The secret structure of great talks,” (TEDxEast, November 2011), accessed June 25, 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_ the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html.

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beginning

middle

what is

what is

FIG. 6 Adapted from Nancy Duarte (2012). “Persuasive story pattern�

new bliss (new norm)

what could be

what could be

what could be

end

what is

what is

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Part 3 FORTH

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remembering the future

Our memories, good, bad, or neutral, dictate the connections our brains make with new inputs, presensitizing us to those inputs and preparing us to adapt to them in the future. Our lived experiences serve as the fuel for this ever-expanding database of memories, which prime us for future experiences.

In the same way that lived experience is encoded in memory, simulated experience, or acts of imagination, are encoded in memory too. “I propose,” writes Dr. Moshe Bar, “that a central role of what seems like random thoughts and aimless mental simulations is to create ‘memories,’ which are like actual experience-based memories, but are the outcome of imagined rather than [lived] experiences.”41 When we imagine, our brains are creating what in 1985 David Ingvar called “memories of the future:” memories that are records of experience just like any other memory, but that are derived from simulated experience. Bar continues, “Unlike real memories, these simulation-based ‘memories’ have not really taken place, but we benefit from them just like we do from memories that did occur previously. Therefore, one primary, if not the cardinal, role of memory is to guide our behavior in the future based on similarities (i.e., analogies), and this memory can be a result of real as well as imagined experience.”42 Our brains create simulations constantly, from imagining what one will cook and eat for dinner to what one would do if the ceiling collapsed.43 As Bar suggests, these seemingly random thoughts can actually help guide us toward action. Hassabis and Maguire write, “...it is clear that the ability to pre-experience hypothetical events confers an evolutionary advantage in planning for the future.”44 Just like nostalgia, imagination provides a cognitive cushion for dealing with new experiences. And just as nostalgia’s adaptive inaccuracy allows us to tell stories about a past that perhaps never was, imagination allows us to encode similar narratives in memory in order to prepare for a better future. Remembering the future

41

42 43

44

Bar, Moshe, “The Proactive Brain,” In Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future, edited by Moshe Bar, 13-26 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19.

Bar, “The Proactive Brain,” 19-20.

Bar, Moshe, Skype conversation, Boston-Tel Aviv, August 21, 2013.

Hassabis and Maguire, “Deconstructing episodic memory with construction,” 79.

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could be as easy as remembering the past.

But memory still has an advantage. It has artifacts, sensory triggers, and props. It feels real, even though it may not be. How might we enhance our imaginations to enable us to form memories of the future we want, and for the change we think is necessary to get there? And how might we recall those memories more clearly? How might we make them feel as real as our nostalgic recollections?

This is the challenge of the designer as ethnographer of imagination.

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memento futuri

If imagination creates a horizon, a “no-place-as-yet” that stretches beyond space and time, how will we get there? How will we reach that unreachable beyond that is the future? We reach the past through memories, and we access memories via the world around us: objects, sensory inputs, people, places.

This is also how we can conjure future memories. A horizon will only get us part of the way there.

For this journey to the future, we need small outposts along the way to give us something to bump into, to plan for, and to encounter. Somewhere we can rest, have a meal, take in the scenery, and then travel onward, toward that elusive horizon, until we come upon the next one, and the next one. These stops along the way are the breadcrumbs: the hot water and gloomy sky, the smell of peppermint oil, citronella, and rosemary, our proximal possible selves, the red hills of Georgia.45 But these breadcrumbs are not cast backward as they were for Hansel and Gretel. We will throw them forward for us to find when we need them most. They will guide us toward our possible futures by giving us something real to remind us what it was we imagined in the first place.

Myths and fables have given us practice in transforming imagination into something real. Myths are collective memories, part of the swirling pool of stories and mental images that make up our possible futures. They are narratives of pasts that we desired and futures that we warned against. “For humans to understand,” writes Douglas McGaughey, “we must throw our myths ahead of us, passing through them to experience the world.”46 To access both the past and the future, we need props in which to embed memories, and prompts to cue those memories. In an imagined future, these props and prompts are myths that we must pass through to understand the world we envisioned, and to bring it into sharper focus.

Religious objects act as props in imagined scenarios. Like the speculative designer’s artifacts from an imagined future, the objects of religious ritual are artifacts from a mythological past, embedded with memories from that world. What is religion but a form of mythology, and what is ritual but the rehearsal

45 46

King, “I Have a Dream.”

McGaughey, Douglas, “Through Myth to Imagination,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 73.

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FIG. 7 Future fossils as relics of a possible future. New geological materials reflect human influence on the environment. Yesenia ThibaultPicazo (2012)

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of belief? We re-create and re-enact the scenes of these myths to reinforce our belief in them and their transformative power. In Judaism, for example, we prepare for the symbolic appearance of the Prophet Elijah at the end of the Passover seder by setting an empty place at the table, pouring a glass of wine, and leaving the door ajar.

He walks up the front steps of the house, dressed like some kind of king with velvet robes and fur, and I think he might be hot but then again, he’s a prophet, so maybe he doesn’t mind. As we sit silently, stunned by his sudden but entirely choreographed appearance, he saunters into the kitchen, dipping his finger in the leftovers that have already been stacked by the sink. He tastes the maror, a combination of apples, dates, nuts and cinnamon; the apples have started to brown but his eyes widen and a grin begins to form.

I smile because that’s my favorite too. He sits down at the table and, with everyone watching, gulps down the wine, sighing happily before standing up again, walking back through the kitchen and out of the front door, closing it behind him. Through the window I see him wipe his mouth on his sleeve, then he walks back out into the night, on to the next house, where he’ll do it all over again.

When we have objects to touch and feel and actions that we can perform, our imaginations open up.

We remember through these objects and interactions, constructing new details and images along the way. We are also prompted to remember through objects and sensations that evoke something familiar, like the smell of peppermint or the rounded corners of an old VHS cassette [Figure 8].

Skeuomorphs are digital or physical objects that retain visual cues from a familiar original. Apple’s release of its new iOS 7 operating system on June 10, 2013 was hailed the “death of skeuomorphism.”47 Apple, under Steve Jobs’s guidance, had been known for its use of skeuomorphism in its products, from the digital “trash can” to the wood-veneered bookshelf in the “Books” app. Particularly in the transition from physical to digital, elements of the physical world are carried over as metaphors: cues to users to help them understand more intuitively how to use these new products. Physical objects can also be skeuomorphs, referring back to older, more familiar models by evoking a similar shape, material, or weight, for example. Skeuomorphism is designerly nostalgia, a method for prompting us to remember “the good old days” that is as much emotional as it is practical. Familiarity is comforting. But as comforting as the horizontal lines and yellow pages of the “Notes” pad are, there are more interesting forms of digital note-taking that these holdovers from the physical world inhibit. Skeuomorphism, many believe, hampers innovation by constraining possibility.

47

Evans, Claire, “A Eulogy for Skeuomorphism,” Motherboard, June 12, 2013, accessed June 17, 2013, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-eulogy-forskeumorphism.

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FIG. 8 Ruler for creating “nostalgic corners,” skeuomorphs of old technologies like VHS, radio, and Gameboy. In “Authenticity” by Amy Radcliffe (2012)

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Speculative design already does a version of all this. By designing objects, interactions, or experiences from a future world, the speculative designer asks his audiences to extrapolate from their world to his [Figure 9]. If the designer has done his job, the journey will be incremental as it deviates further and further from the audience’s reality. The most effective speculative design projects combine elements from a collective, familiar reality, with elements of a singular, imagined future. There has to be something for the audience to grasp, to ease them into this new world. Starting too far into the future, or too far into the possible, limits the designer’s ability to connect with his or her audience. The audience needs props and prompts that, rather than representing a designer’s singular vision, reflect the deeply human mechanisms that determine the way we think about and imagine possibility.

Breadcrumbs, outposts, skeuomorphs, triggers: these are the materials that can help create — and remind us of — the futures we envision. These are memento futuri: props and prompts for the future.

Using what we know about nostalgia, memory, the senses, and prediction, it is possible to create future memories that enhance imagination, and memento futuri through which to access future memories.

The notion of “imagining a better future” gains credence when we know that our imagination is just as important as our lived experience in priming us for future action. The limits of lived experience, from geography to physical capability to social status, are no barrier to the individual with a willingness to imagine.

The designer as ethnographer of imagination has two roles. One is to facilitate detailed, future-oriented imagination that is personally relevant, meaningful, and memorable; the other is to create memento futuri to access memories of that future. Through this new role, the designer as ethnographer also becomes an instigator of social change, helping to transform possibility into imagination, imagination into action.

Galton’s Breakfast Table Test instructs us that the strongest mental images are well-illuminated, welldefined, and colorful. The designer as ethnographer of imagination works with individuals, communities, companies — and anyone who sees a glimmer on the horizon of that ‘something different’ that might change things for the better — to shed light on, sharpen, and give color to their visions. And to do that, one must have hope that whatever is on the horizon is worthy of the journey it will take to get there. One must believe that it will all make sense in the end. I am hopeful that our future memories, like our myths, will help us make sense of and act on the challenges we face as we look forward at an uncertain future.

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FIG. 9 Genetically-engineered fungus becomes a new type of infrastructure providing heat, light and building material for refugees. Tobias Revell (2012)

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“While myth and history collapse into a dynamic process of understanding our world, both our experience and our understanding drive us beyond our given narrative horizon of the moment of ‘more.’ Myth and history collapse into temporality. We move through myth to temporality (to ever ‘more’) as human reason in the world” - Douglas McGaughey

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remembering the future

A friend often asks me: is there a there there?

I’m not sure. What is “a there?” Is it a good idea? A satisfactory resolution? A latitude and longitude? I suppose that’s the beauty of the phrase. It can be anything I — or you — want it to be. It is my hope that, in the course of this essay, I have made a convincing argument for a there: a set of conclusions that are knowable but leave room for explorations of ‘ever more.’

In thinking about how to imagine a better future, one must necessarily look to the past — to moments that, like the future, seem at once fleeting and infinite — to understand how we hold on to and makes sense of what we cannot see or feel. These moments come to us as memories, through the props in which we embed them, or the prompts that trigger them. Novelty and emotion make memories memorable, and we are prone to remember the good over the bad because it gives us hope in the face of uncertainty. Memories make up the aggregate of our experiences, accessible to us as scripts that allow us to make predictions and act on new experiences.

The field of cognitive neuroscience links remembering and imagining through constructive memory.

Subsequent findings reveal that we encode imagined experiences in memory just as we encode our lived experiences, which means that we can form memories of a future that we have imagined but never actually experienced. Rather than accessing memories that remind us of the past, we can imagine the future to create memories that will remind us of that future.

Using memento futuri, the props and prompts for future memories, we can take advantage of how and what we remember to help us envision the future. The ways we manage the future in everyday life, from the creation of possible selves to our capacity to form mental images, help us understand our attitudes toward possibility, and our willingness to embrace change. Memories from the past and future provide scripts for future action, which, given the right combination of optimism and hope, might allow us to

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make good on the promise to create positive change in the world.

What remains unexplored is the method by which I propose to facilitate the creation of future memories.

By implicating the designer as an ethnographer, I seek to combine design and anthropology in such a way that one is necessarily the other, and vice versa. The designer as ethnographer endeavors to guide anyone and everyone through a speculative process of imagination that allows them to think about, articulate, interpret, and invent their own futures. This process is at once interpretive and constructive: the designer as ethnographer intervenes to understand and understands to intervene.48 Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor’s concept of Ethnographic Futures Research (EFR), a methodology for creating future scenarios based on the speculation of individuals within a particular sociocultural group, provides a starting point from which to think about the fusion of ethnography and speculative design. Like the valence, temporality, and likelihood of the possible selves that guide our future behavior (or that help the speculative designer formulate future scenarios), Textor’s Ethnographic Futures Research adjusts to these basic conditions in establishing a defined time frame to which each speculation is directed, and eliciting positive, negative, and most likely scenarios. EFR invites members of a community to imagine an optimistic future scenario, a pessimistic future scenario, and the most probable future scenario within the context of their group. The findings of EFR are then reported in a narrative text called a “protocol,” “...which should ‘make the future seem real so that the reader can ‘relate to’ it.”49 To create future memories, we need an alternative EFR for which the outcome is not simply a text but a series of scenarios and designs that reflect a detailed understanding of the future visions of individuals and communities. Through EFR, the designer as ethnographer becomes a creative partner, an imaginative doula of sorts, who helps individuals imagine the future they want for themselves and for the rest of the world. Personal visions for the future are just as important for creating social change as collective visions. Creating future memories from those visions is a deeply personal endeavor, one that requires an exploration of the self, or what I call autoprospecting, that is perhaps the most challenging part of imagining a better future. Deciding what “better” means, as well as establishing the particular memento futuri that will trigger our own future memories, is what will ultimately determine whether our imagined experiences lead to future action.

48 49

Halse, “Design Anthropology,” 20.

Textor, Robert, “Methodological appendix,” In The Middle path for the future of Thailand, edited by S. Ketudat, 135-152 (Honolulu: Institute for Culture and Communication, East-West Center, 1990): 151.

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For all of us, creating memento futuri is a matter of reverse engineering. From our existential hopes, fears, and dreams, we must mine trivialities. The artifacts and experiences of ‘lived life:’ the things that we touch, taste, and breathe, that we covet, that we dispose of and find anew, are the trivialities that protect us from what we feel we cannot reach, horizons and otherwise. But what we cannot reach, we can imagine, and what we can imagine, we can remember. Our future memories will guide us into the uncertain future, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs at our feet.

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PAST

FUTURE

REMEMBERING

IMAGINING

TRIGGER

TRIGGER

IMAGINATION

TRIGGER

NOW1

THEN-1

NOW2

NOW3

...

MEMORY

THEN1

MEMORY

MEMORY

IMAGINING FIG. 10 Our memories of past lived experiences are prompted in the present by triggers that remind us of those experiences. We fill in the gaps in our memories with imagination. This process applies to the future, with an additional step. We can imagine new experiences in order to remember them, and then design triggers (memento futuri) to help us recall memories from those imagined futures. From the series of nows in which we live in the present, we can look backwards, or forwards, at “then.”

REMEMBERING

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bibliography

bibliography

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books

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Crapanzano, Vincent. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in LiteraryPhilosophical Anthropology. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

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Bar, Moshe. “The Proactive Brain.” In Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future, edited by Moshe Bar, 13-26. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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“Simulated Worlds: Transportation Into Narratives.” In Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, edited by Keith Markman, William Klein, and Julie Suhr, 241-254. New York, NY: Psychology Press, 2009.

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Fraser, Scott. “Why eyewitnesses get it wrong.” TEDxUSC, May 2012, 2012.

Accessed July 10, 2013. http://www.ted. com/talks/scott_fraser_the_problem_ with_eyewitness_testimony.html.

Zimbardo, Philip. “The Psychology of Time.” TED2009, February 2009.

Accessed May 20, 2013. http:// www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_ prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time. html.

Iyer, Pico. “Where is Home?” TEDGlobal, June 2013. Viewed June 2013.

Accessed August 22. 2013. http://www. ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_ home.html.

King, Martin Luther. “I Have a Dream...”

March on Washington, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Accessed August 23, 2013. http://www.archives.gov/press/ exhibits/dream-speech.pdf.

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Bar, Moshe. Skype conversation, BostonTel Aviv. August 21, 2013.

Kosslyn, Stephen M. Skype conversation.

Boston-San Francisco, July 15, 2013.

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appendix

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conversation with Dr. stephen M Kosslyn

Psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn is a former professor of Psychology and Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. His primary research focused on visual mental imagery and memory.

LZP If I imagine my dream home, for example, could you describe what is happening in my brain?

SK The first question is, what kind of information do you have up there already... so do you have ideas about how many rooms it has, what style of architecture it is, that sort of thing. So you’ve got some kind of elaborate description that’s being used to access visual memories, so you’re doing it by analogy to things you’ve seen before on some level. The issue becomes how big those units are. If it’s something completely new, maybe you’re imagining it in its constituent elements. But it’s probably similar enough to things you’ve actually seen that you’re using some kind of modified version of something you’ve seen before to construct the image. You might actually do it that way. There are two ways you could do it: one is you can modify the description and use that to generate the visual part, which is much more difficult than I’m making it sound, or you could imagine something you’ve actually seen and then start expanding parts, shrinking parts, changing where the windows are, which is probably in many ways easier, because you don’t have to work with as small parts or as many of them.

LZP How are remembering and simulating connected, technically and practically?

SK So the way I use the term “remembering” is that you’ve got something stored in your long term memory, that you’ve seen or heard or somehow encountered, or it could be described to you, whatever. It’s something that is a record of a previous experience. So it’s not necessarily reality, but it’s the way you’ve perceived it at the time. Remembering is about digging that out. Usually, we’re not like cameras, so we don’t record things either completely accurately or in their entirety, that is, we’ll often get fragments. So every time you move your eyes, and you’re looking at something, you’re only getting about two degrees of visual angle at high resolution. Close one eye and hold up your thumb at arm’s length. That’s about two degrees of visual angle, what your thumb is. And that’s about what you get in your full view. The full

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view is the high resolution part of your retina. So it’s a tiny amount of your visual field. If you held a hula hoop around your head, and you divided it into 360 equal parts, and if your head is in the center, each of those is a degree of visual angle. That’s all you actually see with high resolution, which is shocking. It feels like a lot more than that because you’re always moving your eyes around. Acuity drops off really rapidly from the center two degrees. So a lot of what we remember is very fragmentary, because we’ve just moved our eyes around and we’re only getting little visual gulps of high res. Remembering has a big constructive component. A lot of people don’t realize this. They think it’s like retrieving a photograph from a computer file or something. It’s not like that. It’s retrieving a bunch of fragments that you have to construct and put together. So there’s a constructive process even in remembering. Prospection just takes that constructive process and pushes it in a different direction. What prospection is about is taking what you remember and trying to project what’s going to happen in the future based on that. It probably uses a lot of the same mechanisms as remembering. Simulation is a different kind of thing.

That’s where you take something that you either remember or construct, and you treat it as a kind of mental model, and you put it through it’s paces to see what would happen if.

LZP How do sensory cues influence the mental images we make, and are there certain cues that are more powerful than others?

SK Emotion. The cues that evoke strong emotions... the emotions themselves can evoke mental imagery.

It’s all a function of your previous experience. So it’s not going to be the same for you as it is for me or for whomever.

LZP Does making simulation tangible in some way, like drawing a picture, or modeling something with clay, or play acting, influence how we think about that thing?

SK Simulation is a means whereby you can accomplish prospection. It’s not the only one, there are other ways you can try to use what you know to project into the future. Mental imagery and simulation are just one way to do it. That’s a really good question. I suspect you’re right. I don’t know of any research on that. There are people, like my wife, who had really wretched mental imagery when we first met.

And at the time, I remember being nervous that our kids would inherit it. It turned out that she was very trainable. She got much much better, so it wasn’t like it was a genetic curse or something. So the question is what is the best way to train it. I haven’t thought about it this way, but I bet learning to draw or learning to model, something with direct feedback to improving your imagery... to my knowledge no one’s every studied that, weirdly enough.

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conversation with dr. moshe bar

Dr. Moshe Bar is the director of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, where he does research on perception, prediction, cognition, affect, and mood.

LZP What aspects of simulations make things stay in memory?

MB Other than emotions, or affect, one of the strongest characteristics for information staying in memory is novelty. Our brain seeks to predict everything as much as possible, and when we encounter something new, ...it’s not in our database, in our repertoire of things we can make predictions about. So starting at a very early age, the brain is almost wired to look for novel aspects in the environment. When we talk about about a new situation... the mere novelty, regardless of the context, is something that’s very powerful in orienting our attention and affecting subsequent memory.

LZP How does affect play a role in our ability not just to understand new experiences, but also to remember new experiences?

MB We don’t necessarily know the molecular mechanisms behind this, but we do know that emotion is a huge enhancer of memory. An extreme example, of course, is PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, because there you see memories that people just cannot get rid of, in spite of how much they suffer from them, and in spite of their strong desire to get rid of them, they cannot because there’s so much emotion associated with this experiences that it’s just so glued to memory it’s impossible to remove. Things that elicit strong emotions enhance the efficiency with which these memories stay for the long run.

LZP What role do our senses play in encountering new things and remembering?

MB Our senses are the conduits that convey the outward environment into our brains, and also help us further explore things depending on which of the senses. They all convey the outward environment into our brains, and maybe our brains then guide our senses to continue exploring certain aspects of our

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environment and not others. The senses are the interface.

LZP Could you talk a little bit about the term future memory and what it means?

MB We keep in memory things that we actually experience ourselves. But because of this amazing capability of our brains to simulate things, to imagine new scenarios -- and we’re not talking here about fantasies, about us flying on the back of a butterfly -- but things that actually could happen.

Such simulations add up to scripts of new experiences, because they start off in a reasonable way, like for example, you’re sitting in line for your hairdresser or for the dentist, and you’re so bored you start thinking, ‘if the ceiling falls, how would I react?’ Then you run this entire little short clip in your mind, that even if it’s very unlikely to happen, nevertheless you use logical and ecologically valid steps in this simulation, right? You’re not starting to fly or get some superpowers, but you actually imagine how you help people evacuate, and how you might guide yourself and others, and where would you run from, etc, so even if it’s an unlikely scenario, you ended up really developing this simulation as a new experience.

That’s our hypothesis; the brain already has this scenario, it doesn’t matter anymore if it came through real experience or imaginary experience, storing it in this database that is later used for predictions is very beneficial, because then if something like this happens, or something that can be derived from this same situation, happens in the future, you can access it in memory and act according to it because this is something you’ve already developed and you can use it with the same ease and the same benefit as you could use a memory of an actually-experienced experience.

LZP Would physical or sensory interactions with elements of an imagined experience change how we store it memory or recall it or even act on it in the future?

MB It’s an interesting question, I think that if you emphasize an interaction with a certain object, or a certain action that you exert upon this object that is novel in some way, and store it in memory.... I do think... but you have to understand this is speculation, we haven’t tested it. But I would suspect that it does affect your real memory and your real interactions with it in the future. I don’t know if it happens to you, but sometimes somebody or something shows up in your dream, and in a way a dream is a kind of a simulation -- I’m not saying it’s the same, but it’s still not driven by outside stimuli. So maybe I’m odd in this way, but sometimes you dream about someone or something and then the next morning you run into this someone or something, and you feel this special affinity or special connection or... special kind of heightened attention to this specific target, just because it participated in this simulation. So I think that it’s highly likely that having simulated certain interactions would affect such interactions in the future, in the sense not only that you’re more ready for these interactions because you’ve simulated

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you’ve experienced them in your simulations, so you can perform them afterwards with better ease, but also you might have some other type of connection... this action, this object, this individual.

LZP How do you think one could take advantage of future memory to help an imagined possible future become real, or prepare for that imagined future?

MB I do think this connects to the other part of your question about simulation. Because if you think about this car, you can start simulating about different ways not only of how you’ll enjoy this car, but also different ways of being able to obtain it. So this would be simulation/planning. Thinking about the future towards a certain goal is really planning, it’s not aimless simulation like sitting the hairdresser thinking about the ceiling falling on your head, but it’s actually more goal oriented, because you want something to be accomplished.

Now, thinking about a better future is a little more open ended question, that for me, the first thing is to define a better future. If that means more cheesecakes in the morning, or more money, or more success at school, or better health for your parents... If what you’re saying, let’s find ways of directing people’s future simulations towards achieving a goal, so its not just for entertaining or planning for an unspecific future that’s very unlikely to happen, let’s have them simulate certain memories toward a certain goal. I’d have to think a little more about how to do that.

LZP The prompt for that was thinking about the way in which the sense of smell, or those sensory triggers, can bring us into this very vivid and potentially very emotional past, how could we create things that do that forward, into the future. This particular area seems very promising in the sense that if you speak with someone in a more ethnographic way to try to understand their hopes and dreams, or what their positive future scenario may be, could you develop things, props or prompts, that help that become a reality.

MB I think it’s a very creative direction to think, and I like it. I think we have to break it into sub components.

One is how does one incorporate, or guide one to incorporate emotion into your simulations, so you don’t only think about the mechanics of preparing your future dinner for tonight, but you also are going to imagine the music in the background, or to imagine expecting your date to be knocking on the door as you’re cooking, or imagine that the flavor of this dish... I think that’s it’s very possible to implant or to plug or to encourage using affect or pouring affect into your simulations. I think the more challenging part of the discussion is how you actually use anything in design.. what elements would you use to encourage simulations to begin with? How would you design a chair or a building or sunglasses that

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would make the observer look at them and be more biased to simulate about the future?

LZP A lot of the work that’s being done in my department is actually a version of this without realizing that that’s what it’s trying to do. So people create these scenarios and make objects from that future, and hope that people can connect with that future through the objects.

MB I see, so kind of back to the future. In any planning test or game, where you’re in point A and you need to get to point B, now you have to think about how to get there. You kind of run through the scenarios of where you have to get to, and you examine a few possibilities until you take the one that seems most likely. Try to think more about items, visual characteristics of an existing object that’s just in front of you, and it’s a familiar object, not something that requires the designer to think about the future and bring something from it back. We know, for example, that if you see pictures of people that are about to perform a certain action, areas of the brain that are involved in controlling these actions light up. Which means that seeing implied motion, you see someone about to jump from a cliff, then you see the rest of the scenario in your mind’s eye.

LZP I think you could certainly use design elements to suggest the completion of the thing, or an action.

MB It would be interesting to think... because, on one hand there are the short term elements, like if there’s an object and it has an angle that’s pointing upwards, maybe on some conscious or unconscious level the observer thinks about upward motion... so there is some forward projection based on the static visual element of an object. The disappointing thing is that it’s very short term. The other end of the spectrum is what you said people in your field are doing, which is to show a future object and help people or count on people to be extrapolating in their future to get from where they are to this object.

And this obviously, the plus is that it’s a longer timeline, but at the same time you have to create these futuristic objects... but maybe it’s good.