1. INTRODUCTION

Designers and designers researchers working with FUTURES DESIGN are entangled with time as a material and in helping others to appreciate and engage with time. Our work is situated in a future or futures context. It depends on co-design and clients’ perceptions of time in projects. It influences how we can involve participants and users and support motivated influence and impact in the near, middle distance or far flung future.

Time is realised through and makes it possible to realise futures events. Think of the app Snapchat for example and the limited time frames within which it works. How is time used in our designs and in the applications and systems we construct, share and propose. Or how to appreciate time in a future user journey for a service situated in the distant future..

We take part in futures scenarios, meet project strategies and adopt personas and meta-evaluative views of futures designs because we take up performative roles in being in and with time, and design time. Topics, actors, enactment and our reviews of our engagement are all connected to future movement and movement in futures. 

Change and transformation, possible and speculative scenarios and storyworlds are possible to imagine, perceive and critique because we also use narrative, dramaturgy and reflexive evaluation as means to track and trace states, actions, shifts and change in and over time.

2. WORDS AND SHAPING TIME

We think we know about language and the future because we use it every day to orient and communicate our thoughts, aspiration and expectations. This LEXICON focuses on English and a western European located and informed project. Many students have other languages as their primary means of work as well as different cultural and geographical backgrounds where time may be differently played out in another language. We encourage you to consider these as part of your cultural resource in learning and to look into how time is conceptualised and formed in that language’s formulations of time.

ACTIVITY #1 : LANGUAGE AND TIME

1. Many of us are bilingual or multilingual so we may even mix different grammars in sentences or in sections of talk.

2. Think a little about how you express future time in a language other than English before we go ahead, or if you have only English, do the same.

ACTIVITY # 2: DESIGN, LANGUAGE AND HISTORIES

1. We all refer back to how we have done or experienced things in the past. In shaping futures for design as a field and for specific work, we look back at how projects, artifacts and material were used to try to create novel or innovative products or processes. We also or the ways design were used, marketed, understood or influenced us.

2. Here are two terms: a) retroactive and b) retrospective. What do they mean to you ? Now  look them up in a dictionary and note down definitions.

3. Go online and search for two innovative products that were presented in their time as being transformational, innovative and future changing. You may need to think back to or consult notes or books on Design Histories.

4. Here are two more terms: a) proactive and b) prospective.What do they mean to you ? Now  look them up in a dictionary and note down definitions.

5. Go online and search for two innovative products that were presented in their time as being transformational, innovative and future changing. You may need to think back to or consult notes or books on Design Histories.

3. THE FUTURE AS A SPACE FOR WORKING WITH TIME

Time can be understood as sequential, durative, iterative, repetitive and cyclical. Futures time asks that we suspend our disbelief and engage imaginatively with what is proposed, projected, situated and materialised in the future. This may not correspond to our immediate, given or selected reality of today or that of previous times or design trends of movements, marketing or consumption. In working with spaces of futures times, we may not assume the values or practices of today, such as the force and destructive effects on environments and people of extractive economies and design cultures of uncritical consumption and exhaustion of resources and damage to the biosphere.

The future can be seen as a space beyond where we are and what it is constrained by. It has to be imagined, not only planned and expected if we are to work towards alternate and survivable societies and daily lives in an increasingly interlinked global system. So futures are projected or creatively thrown ahead of where we are and where out thinking might be! They may be anticipated, awaited, with hope or apprehension, or they may be characterised in terms of disaster, urgent need or deep thinking and concerted action to effect long lasting change. This all refers to near, distant, and far off futures. When, for how long, in what ways does time work in that future, and within what time do events happen

Time may still have linear elements, but the future may be  a place and a space within which time may also be considered as non-linear. Time may work sequentially, but a future scenario may also not map to our current realities and conceptualisation of time in the present and about the past. The future is a space for working with time. There we may shape or meet simultaneous time planes or spaces. Times in which people and objects appear and act may be in key with one another. These may allow us to present parallel dramaturgies with different forces or outcomes that influence or affect them. And time may be split, deliberately, suddenly or unexpectedly and produce divergent realities that serve to accentuate how imagine and design routes and choices may have different effects and outcomes and need different strategies. These times need to be designed, they do not exist, whatever way time is being taken up as a material.

ACTIVITY #3: WORKING WITH NOTIONS OF TIME AND FUTURES DESIGN

1. Write a short outline futures design scenario that connects your interest in design with a small project on climate change in the year 2050. Your outline will need to include the following words: interrupted, broken, diffused, delayed.

2. Give your scenario a title.

3. Look back at your scenario. It will likely include what we can call ‘event time’ and ‘scenario time’.  What is the period within which your scenario takes place? Is there a lead up to 2050 and a follow on or futures effect? What is its lifespan?

4. Let’s add an unexpected event to your scenario. this is up to you, it can be from outside the scenario or be a consequence of an element within it.

5. In what way would you say that this influences or changes the scenario: it is a cyclical item, that loops an aspect of the place, materials, actors or events? Or does it create a pause, a gap in time, or a repetition. Is it durative meaning it continues, or is it iterative or repetitive? Is time fleeting or slipping away as a result?

6. Rewrite your scenario to include the unexpected element, paying extra careful attention to how you use words to do with time.

4. FUTURES DESIGN CONTEXTS AND RELATED LANGUAGE

The type of future space or event or world being designed also influences the type of words that are used to imagine, construct and convey it. 

ACTIVITY #4: VISUALISING AND LABELLING TIME IN FUTURES DESIGN SCENARIOS

1. Choose to design a scenario that is strongly utopian or dystopian. What is it that motivates you in selecting when this happens and the content of the scenario.

2. Name the scenario and write a one line description, stating when it happens and how time is used. Who and what are involved, where is it set?

3. Now orient your scenario to either a a) political, b) strategic economic, c) mythical or d) narrative future.

4. Rename the scenarios and make any needed written notes.

5. Next, on paper or on screen draw a series of scenes that illustrate the scenario, using any visual communication techniques of our choice, e.g. annotated photos, line drawings, collage comic format etc. Leave a 5cm space all the way around your illustration.

6. Now annotate your illustrated scenario with specific time based words, phrases and notes. Use these to explain how it works, what you referred to and included to work this time of the scenario into a design. Note also what the longer term effects or outcomes of the scenario might be and are likely to be.

ACTIVITY #5: FUTURES WORDS DEFINITIONS AND SCENARIOS

1.From the text in this whole Unit, choose 10 words connected to time.

2. Write 2 line definitions for 5 of these terms.

3. Write 2 line future scenarios of use for 5 of these terms.

ACTIVITY #6: DIMENSIONS OF FUTURES DESIGN AND LITERACIES

1. Go to the FUTURES DESIGN NEXUS.

2. What is a NEXUS? Look up the word in an online dictionary.

3. The FUTURES DESIGN NEXUS is a four way meeting of the core elements.

4. When looking at the four main categories – TIME, MOTION, FORCE and SPACE – notice that the more future oriented ‘view’ for each category is closer to the centre of the table.

ACTIVITY #7: SORTING AND PLOTTING FUTURES DESIGN WORDS

1. Go to the FUTURES DESIGN NEXUS.

2. Referring to the 50 FUTURES DESIGN WORDS (Words only), plot as many of the words into the categories and their sub sections.

3. Compare what you have done with another master’s or PhD student.

4. List the futures design words you are using in your own project.

5. Plot them into the FUTURES DESIGN NEXUS. You might find it helpful to try to orient this plotting according to: a) design disciplines (Product, Interaction, Service, Systems) and b) intersections, overlaps or gaps between them.

Morrison, Andrew. 2017a. “Design fiction in design education: Urbanism, para-pedagogy and futures literacies.” In Cumulus Working Papers 33/16: Cumulus Hong Kong 2016 – Open Design for E-very-thing, edited by Cecile Kung, Elita Lam and Yanki Lee, 105-112. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Design Institute, Cumulus.

Stibbe, Arran. 2014. “An ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse studies.” Critical Discourse Studies 11(1): 117-128.

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