1. INTRODUCTION

Let’s now consider words to do with motion. This is important for FUTURES DESIGN as future time and designing – in and for and with futures – needs to engage us in not only scenarios and narratives and purposes but also ways in which they are performed ahead of now.

2. TIME IS REALISED IN SPACE AND THROUGH MOTION

This performance of FUTURES DESIGN takes place via movement. We therefore need vocabularies of futures movement or kinetics.This refers to time itself, to how a project or event happens, and to how our agency and actions are released kinetically, along with that of other entities and systems.

ACTIVITY #1: WORKING WITH FUTURES MOVEMENT WORDS

1. Before going further about specifically futures words for movement, think about how you use words in describing what you did yesterday. Choose 2 items for your day.
What nouns and verbs do you use? How do you use adverbs to describe how you did things, that is slowly or repeatedly for example.

2. Go to the 50 FUTURES DESIGN WORDS (Words only) and look for movement words.

3. Go to the LIST OF SEMANTIC CATEGORIES (With definitions) and look for words to do with movement. (They may be in more than one category).

4. See if you can group these movement words into categories by what they do (verbs), name (nouns) and manner (adverbs).

5. Choose 10 words from these groupings that you think you cannot do without in the kind of movement that will be needed in your FUTURES design project or research.

3. VERBS AND FUTURES MOVES VIA DESIGN

ACTIVITY #2 : MOVING FUTURES WITH WORDS

1. Consider that the future is filled with movement just as the past has been and your daily life as a design in the here-and-now. Movements can be slow and gather pace, they can shift and shear and speed up, and they can be delaying, paused, suddenly burst forth and veer off in different directions.

2. But what is moving in your future project? What is its topic and who are the ‘actors’ (persons, groups, organisations, things, nonhumans, systems, etc)?

3. Go to the FUTURES DESIGN MOVEMENT WORDS (Words only) and read through the verbs.

4. Now choose 20 that interest you and relate to your project.

5. In what way might they convey some of the character, actions, pace and happenings of your FUTURES DESIGN world building?

6. Choose 5 words from your choice or 10, or others if needed, but just 5 in total.

7. Explain in writing how you see these words as fitting in to the setting, scenario, actors or stakeholders in your ‘world’ and what these words suggest is and can and might happen. This means you should write a paragraph and include these 5 words.

8. How might these verbs be visualised in an illustration of what you have written?

4. LOOKING AHEAD

ACTIVITY #3 : PROMPTS TO WRITING TIME AND MOVEMENT CENTRED SCENARIOS

1. A future that is delayed has consequences for our expectations of what the future may reveal or allow.

2. Futures that are dilated as in a process of opening out, like ones pupils expand.

3. Write a series of instructions in numbered stages for another design student to follow to work with time and specific kinetic words to realise a futures scenario concerning a design view on climate and environment in 2050.

4. Give your scenario a name and a one line description as to what it does to work with time as a design material.

Akama, Yoko, Moline, Katherine. & Pink , Sarah  (2017). ‘Disruptive interventions with mobile media through Design+Ethnography+Futures’. In Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway & Genevieve Bell. (Eds.). The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography. London and New York: Routledge.

Morrison, Andrew, and Alettia Chisin. 2017. “Design fiction, culture and climate change: weaving together personas, collaboration and fabulous futures.” The Design Journal 20:

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