How do we know about the future? What does the future look like? How do we imagine it? How do we build it?

If imagination is the capacity to introduce the future into the present, we need tools that activate it. The FPP help you envision an ‘otherwise’ future. They build new stories that break the colonization of imagination, and help you scaffold your design projects, interventions, and practice, in an exploratory, inventive, open-ended, speculative-pragmatic way.

The Future Philosophical Pills (FPP) are a curated set of philosophical insights, concepts, ideas to use to think about futures. They offer packaged critical lenses that interrogate, challenge and unsettle established assumptions around futures. They mobilize design practice and projects (existing or in the making) by disrupting, amplifying, and critiquing ideas around futures. Built around key terms selected though a focus on continental philosophy canon (phase 1), the FPP will be expanded by drawing on the corpus of insights from the Global South (phase 2).

The metaphor of the ‘pill’ evokes the ‘pharmakon’ – which in Greek is both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’: something that can be either beneficial or damaging, according to dosage and mode of intake. This ambivalence of ‘taking the pill’ concerns the use of philosophy-in-action as a practical ‘medicine’, and becomes an asset to stimulate new ways of thinking about futures. The metaphor of the pill suggests an easy-to-swallow format, with active ingredients, prescription modes, and healing properties, but also with side effects and the risk of overdose.

Just bear in mind that the remedy may turn to poison, and vice versa.