Futures design
Dialogue with Karla Paniagua
Anthropologist, PhD in transdisciplinary studies of culture and communication. Director of the Design of Tomorrow program at CENTRO, editor of scientific journals, lecturer, author of books, articles and didactic materials.
Q: Why designing the future?
To answer this question, I think we have to take a step back and ask ourselves what designing means. At least for what I would like to use in this context, designing is about making strategic decisions. These strategic decisions matter because they impact beyond ourselves and our time, and even if we don't make any decisions, we're still affecting the things that happen.
As human beings we are part of an extremely complex interpersonal network, the scope of which we don't comprehend. Therefore, our decisions, even those we consider mundane, influence what happens in the world like a butterfly effect. Whether we're aware of it or not, we still influence what happens. And sometimes, our daily decisions have a predominantly negative impact on other human beings, living beings, and other entities that inhabit our planet for the time being.Not thinking of ourselves as part of an interconnected network, and not thinking strategically about our decisions, has immersed us into the mess we are today: swimming in microplastics, facing water problems, pollution, and with significant social and technological gaps.
To answer the question of why designing the future is important, I took a detour to explain what happens if you don't do it. And by deciding not to do it, you're still influencing whatevers happens, more often in a negative way.
Designing futures implies using futures studies and design tools to facilitate the immersion or the communication of a result. From my experience, futures design is a vehicle that facilitates futures literacy. When people see something presented in a visually or audibly appealing way, they can immerse themselves more easily in the process. Prospective processes almost always involve collective intelligence and imagination, and design elements help make the dynamics more fluid.
Q: How is the future designed and who designs it?
As a field of knowledge, future studies deal with change, therefore, some tools aim to monitor change, others to analyze it, and others provoke it. There is an extensive set of methods for these purposes; just in the catalog of The Millennium Project and in the database of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), there are about 50 tools that can be consulted.
And how is it done? It depends on who you ask. Joseph Boros, the Australian futurist, would say that a generic process for creating futures comprises four stages: inputs, prospective analysis, outputs, and strategy.
While we all have an impact on the things that happen, not all of us have the same agency and influence. I find it helpful to represent this with the quadrants model by Eden and Ackerman, which divides the stakeholders of a system based on their interest and power, where power can be the result from different capitals, such as social capital, financial, encyclopedic, etc. There are four movable positions we can occupy in a system: player, subject, context setter, and crowd. This model teaches us that we are all equal, but some are more equal than others, and part of the work of futurists is to contribute to a more democratic access to agency capability in order to provoke change.
Then comes the question of the desirable direction of change, which is difficult because we don't have a common idea about the future we want to build. The future is always established based on interest groups, and what is a desirable future for your interest group may not be desirable for my interest group. Your utopia could be my dystopia, and that makes it profoundly difficult for us to agree. Although it is challenging to establish a common vision of the most desirable future, we still have to make all possible contributions so that everyone has the same possibilities to pursue the futures that they consider most desired.
What is your poker of skills for the future? Karla Paniagua at TEDxPaseoSantaLucía. Courtesy Karla Paniagua.
Q: What is the future of design?
The truth is that I don't feel authorized to speak about the futures of design as a discipline. It is a very complex system that can’t be reduced to a unified system, and I believe there are many designs and many expressions of design as a discipline and as a professional practice.
If we talk about design as an agency capability, the most desirable scenario is that every person, regardless of their creed, ethnicity, social status, or lifestyle, has the ability to make decisions about the future they consider most desirable for themselves. And also beyond themselves, because we are not islands, and we have to consider the planet, our fellow beings, and the other entities. I don't say this out of romanticism, but out of pragmatism, we are not plants capable of producing our own food with water and sunlight. Hence, what I consider desirable, is not only to have democratic access to futures thinking, but also that the visions about the most desirable future can summon the common will to build it.
I think we are in a “everyman for himself” moment and that it is time to push grassroots efforts at the level of small communities, neighborhoods and autonomous groups that can make agreements and move forward by agreeing on common visions. My everyday work consists in training futures studies professionals, so that in some way they can promote futures literacy and facilitate democratic access to these tools. I direct a specialized postgraduate program that has existed for ten years, education is my trench. I see it not only as a service that begins and ends with the program, but rather as a continuous management of learning communities. These communities are out there, and although they may not work as a consolidated network yet, they do work collaboratively to make future thinking a little more common. A colleague of mine, whom I also consider my teacher, Jorge Camacho, often says that the goal is to make futures a topic of conversation, and that's a way to start.