Future Failings
The overheated exhortations towards revolutionary novelty, the great refiguration of values and so on and so on that were such the hallmark of early-days’-pandemic-thinking have, in the fullness of time, revealed themselves to be considerably less than many—myself most certainly included—had thought and hoped. Things now—with few exceptions—seem as pessimistically same-ol’ same-ol’ as before.
If a global pandemic can’t break our panicked grip on the comfortable present and its safe collection of tomorrows, then what will? The burning of the planet maybe? Although like the frog in the pot, early indications aren’t encouraging on that front either.
And—absent that or some very compelling externality—are we likely to find a place for looking at design differently? The easy answer must surely be, if we are being uncharacteristically honest with ourselves, ‘not likely.’ Yes, we shall continue to do some new things (and thanks be for that), rehash and remix, but how do we get to the new, the extraordinary, the transcendent?
Does it seem mad to suggest that the answer to this is to abandon hope in the future?
Perhaps, but much depends on how one defines and constrains the idea of the future. One view of the future, the one that sits at the heart of our collective narrative (at least, and largely in the West) is a drumbeat rhetoric of human progress, of constant evolutionary perfection. This view requires a ceaselessly oceanic flow of new things, new ideas, new horizons, new opportunities, all typically (and often banally) derived from a timeless now, with little attention or care for from whence things came.
Another view of the future is one that sees it as both derivative and fecund. And, while I’m perfectly willing to abandon hope—or at least reliance—on the first sort of future, this second sort offers something quite different, quite concrete, and quite accessible. This is a future that is actively and intentionally informed by the past, both near and deep. It is a future that has refused to start over, over and over again, and instead embraces what has worked for decades, centuries, and even millennia. It is derived from what we know to be true, from the best of what we have had, and what we have now.
This conservative view of the future is deeply out of favor in those of our industries that are busily promoting Brand New Worlds. Which, if we’re being honest, includes not only the obvious—technology, but oftentimes design as well.
This second vision of the future, the one where possibility depends less on radical otherness than the rediscovery of our inherent otherness—the weird, flourishing, omnipresent cacophony of what it has meant and means to be human—is a way to engage with a tomorrow that assumes the best is always available and not just a thing of the far past or the far future.
By designing from the deep—rediscovering, celebrating, and recontextualizing—we are able to not only see things in a new way, but refashion those visions in the furnaces of the contemporary into an amalgam of old, new, and timeless. The result—deeply and oftentimes seemingly unaccountably resonant—offers the frisson of the new, but with a subtle sense of recognition, a rightness that plays wonderful havoc with our senses of aesthetic appreciation, functional acceptability, and outright desire.
All of which, by the way, helps craft a future that works now, in the present. For all of us. Less pipedream (a word derived, by the way, from the 19C habit of smoking heroin). More clear-eyed fantasy (derived from the Greek, meaning imagination). There are pathways; we just need to step upon them.
—Peter
