Preferable Worlds: Design Practices for Alternative Futures
WORKSHOP
SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2021 at 14:00 - 19:00 (EST/UTC/GMT-04:00)
Duration: 3 Hours
Language: English
To say that we are living through a key moment in history may be an understatement: unprecedented levels of inequality, a crisis of the global democratic order, the challenges of AI and automation, the existential threat of climate change, and then the COVID-19 pandemic. If human history was a TV series we would be living through a cliffhanger. What happens in the next few decades will decide what happens in the next few centuries and beyond.
Interestingly, this comes at a time when design, broadly understood, is being recognized by organizations and communities as an essential mode of engaging with the world and, thus, as the main vector for change. Jorge Camacho started to explore some of these ideas in a recent article, titled "Design: The 'Next' 30 Years", which ended with a brief speculation based on four alternative futures: Growth, Collapse, Discipline, and Transformation.
James Dator's "four generic images of the future" is not only a well-established framework in the futures' field - and particularly useful to explore long-term, broad topics - but it also, quite presciently, maps current discussions in economics, political theory, and social movements about what comes next and, most importantly, what needs to be done.
In this talk and workshop, Jorge will present the basics of this framework and set current conversations that can be mapped onto it: smart green growth, degrowth, anti-civilization, and terraforming, to name a few. Then, through two quick activities, we'll explore how we got here and how design could both contribute and adapt to those futures. Specifically, we'll ask participants to imagine themselves as designers (or, more broadly, as creative professionals) in any one of those alternative futures. What would you do?
Workshop Facilitated by Jorge Camacho
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