“Future Foundations of Design”—the nickname of one of our new endeavors—is an oxymoron. By definition, the future comes later, but a foundation goes down first. Future foundations are the “next, first thing,”; they are the beginnings yet to come.
And that’s precisely the point. This endeavor is guided by two questions: How do we get good at seeing new beginnings before they arrive? How do we choose what to build on them when they get here?
That’s the general posture of our Future Foundations studio. It’s a place for us to experiment and search, a commitment to possibilities and changes, a willingness to alter our foundations even before circumstances require it.
One early nudge toward this way of thinking came from John Arnold, a founder of Stanford’s “Design Division” (as it was known when it began back in the 1960s). Seeking to goose his students’ creative side, Arnold created an imaginary world on a planet called Arcturus IV. He challenged students to design products for the planet’s long-armed, three-fingered, methane-breathing, x-ray vision capable inhabitants. These strange details made sure the students couldn’t rely on preconceived notions. To design anything to suit these unfamiliar creatures, they would have to make creative leaps instead. John Arnold realized the creative leap itself was the work of design.
In Arnold’s mind, products of the age—from car interiors to electronic interfaces—posed questions with no obvious best answer and raised design challenges that intertwined with complex human needs. This made them unpredictable. Straightforward technical engineering and optimization were no longer enough. The circumstances were shifting. He shifted the learning alongside.
Now is another one of those times when the circumstances are shifting so much that it’s again time to inspect the foundations. Or time to seek new ones. And so we look ahead.
Oftentimes, people fixate on the future when the present feels off-kilter. That’s because the future leaves room for an optimism that the present can’t seem to accommodate. It is also a place where we can put our ideals on display in hope that we will meet them when the time comes.
For example, the inflation-laden, pollution-heavy, and politically dicey 1960s and 70s brought future-forward sustainable architecture and far-flung sci-fi theatrics. Those were the days of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome acolytes, not to mention Parliament-Funkadelic’s Mothership Connection, filled with lyrics like, “Light years in time, ahead of our time.” Fuller’s followers tried to fashion sustainable homes in harmony with Mother Earth. P-Funk’s Mothership was an imaginary place that those with outcast identities could call home.
Dreams of the future like these are a kind of nostalgia for a better time—it just so happens to be one that doesn’t exist yet. Usually the visions arrive a little skewed: the Mothership has yet to land but the funky music and inclusive ideals are very much intact. Permanent geodesic homes are still an anomaly, but their portability and durability makes them indispensable as pop-up shelters for refugees. The wholesale adoption of these inventions are as elusive as the future itself, yet their underlying values such as inclusion, service, and environmental stewardship guide our actions to this day.
It’s not too surprising that the future is back in vogue. Once again, the present feels fraught while the past remains unresolved. All the troubles seem to be coming at once, so much so that there’s no need to call them out here—each of us already has a list of the troubles we see.
So we set our sights on the future as a way to help us course-correct the present. Design belongs to the future–it is naturally a future-looking endeavor, always in service of moments to come. Like it or not, the things we create always end up in our futures via the most reliable and relentless delivery system there is: the passage of time.
As we kick off our Future Foundations endeavor, we are looking at what emerging technologies can do for learning, but in a decidedly d.school way. Not by exploring how emergent technology can help deliver information more efficiently, but how it can help students become more adaptive learners. It’s less about what they learn than about how they learn to learn. That’s a future foundation. How will we learn to make the most of what’s to come?
We’re also out to reveal what’s possible. At the d.school we tend to think of prototypes as experiments that teach us what to do next. There’s another kind of prototype: a demonstration of what could be, our own creative leaps that allow us to rehearse the future beyond the bounds of the present. These demonstrative prototypes live in past examples like the mid-twentieth century case study houses: full scale, livable homes each devoted to an exploration of what might be within reach. An example is case study house #8, where Ray and Charles Eames showed how to build a simple, charming, useful structure using mainly surplus materials. We have decidedly different questions than they did, but the spirit of exploring possibility is the same.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we’re on a search. A search for ideas and ideals worth pursuing. A search for people and places that are doing good work. A search for partners that can help us build those future foundations. And finally, a search for the search itself. Our goal is to build a better capacity to locate, listen, and learn. We want to grow our ability to see what’s missing and act on it.
So, to new beginnings. To room for ideals. To better times yet to come. To work in progress. To work on progress.
To future foundations.
Credits
Scott Doorley, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Lisa Kay Solomon