Until recently, analysis of the future was left to forecasters and trend experts. Today, however, designers and architects are playing an increasingly important role, creating products and environments that will change the way we live. Design Futures is a thought-provoking exploration of the radical directions that the creative industries are taking. Design expert Bradley Quinn reveals how a new generation of products, materials and surfaces will align design with such areas as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, reinventing the spaces in which we live and work, and how we experience the human body. Featuring interviews with renowned designers, architects and trend forecasters - among them Karim Rashid, Toyo Ito and Li Edelkoort - and over 250 illustrations of futuristic products and concepts, this is a unique guide to some of the twenty-first century’s most compelling ideas.

"As Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously observed: ''Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.'' Designers and futurists, it turns out, have a great deal in common. This mutual recognition is reaching critical mass as each comes to appreciate how their respective traditions have much to offer to making urgent change in the world, and even more so, together." - From the Editors'' Introduction Design and Futures is a landmark collection of essays, manifestos and peer-reviewed articles, edited by Stuart Candy (Carnegie Mellon University) and Cher Potter (Victoria and Albert Museum), documenting ''design futures'' discourse and practice around the world. Originally appearing in back-to-back issues of the open access Journal of Futures Studies (Tamkang University Press, Taiwan), the present compilation preserves the original formatting while unifying all 30 pieces between covers for the first time. Topics range from worldbuilding and curriculum design to temporality and decolonisation, as well as new methods and processes that build on over a decade of experiential futures, speculative design and related practices. Design and Futures will be an essential reference for anyone working or studying in either field. Contributors * Danah ABDULLA (Brunel University, UK) * Ahmed ANSARI (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) * Paola ANTONELLI (Museum of Modern Art, USA) * Tina AUER (Time''s Up, Austria) * James AUGER (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal) * Nik BAERTEN (Pantopicon, Belgium) * Ralph BORLAND (Independent Artist and Curator, South Africa) * Tim BOYKETT (Time''s Up, Austria) * Anne BURDICK (Art Center College of Design, USA; University of Technology Sydney, Australia) * Stuart CANDY (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) * Ece CANLI (Independent Scholar, Portugal) * Kuo-Hua CHEN (Tamkang University, Taiwan) * David DELGADO (NASA JPL, USA) * Alida DRAUDT (Strategic Foresight Partners LLC, USA) * Jake DUNAGAN (Institute for the Future, USA) * Tony FRY (University of Tasmania, Australia) * Nik GAFFNEY (FoAM, Belgium) * JJ HADLEY (Slalom, USA) * Julian HANNA (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal) * Dan HILL (Vinnova, Sweden) * Jeanne HOFFMAN (Tamkang University, Taiwan) * Ryan HOGAN (Mozilla, USA) * Jamer HUNT (The New School, USA) * Anab JAIN (Superflux, UK; University of Applied Arts, Austria) * Mahmoud KESHAVARZ (Uppsala University, Sweden) * Matthew KIEM (Independent Scholar, Australia) * Lucy KIMBELL (University of the Arts London, UK) * Kelly KORNET (Kalypso, Canada) * Maja KUZMANOVIC (FoAM, Belgium) * Ramia MAZÉ (Aalto University, Finland) * Alex MCDOWELL (University of Southern California, USA) * Timothy MORTON (Rice University, USA) * Mugendi K. M''RITHAA (Independent Designer-Researcher, Kenya) * Leticia MURRAY (Gensler, USA) * Pedro OLIVEIRA (Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany) * Stefanie A. OLLENBURG (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) * DK OSSEO-ASARE (Pennsylvania State University, USA) * Karla PANIAGUA (CENTRO Advanced Design Institute, Mexico) * Cher POTTER (University of the Arts London; Victoria and Albert Museum, UK) * Luiza PRADO (MeetFactory, Czech Republic) * Aaron ROSA (Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, Germany) * Tristan SCHULTZ (Griffith University, Australia) * Gregory STOCK (Firefly, USA) * John A. SWEENEY (Narxoz University, Kazakhstan) * Maya VAN LEEMPUT (Erasmus University College, Belgium) * Julia Rose WEST (Ancestry, USA) * Lizzie YARINA (MIT Urban Risk Lab, USA) * Liam YOUNG (SCI-Arc, USA) * Leah ZAIDI (Independent Scholar, Canada)

This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods. These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics.

A diverse group of scholars redefine constructionism--introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980--in light of new technologies and theories. Constructionism, first introduced by Seymour Papert in 1980, is a framework for learning to understand something by making an artifact for and with other people. A core goal of constructionists is to respect learners as creators, to enable them to engage in making meaning for themselves through construction, and to do this by democratizing access to the world's most creative and powerful tools. In this volume, an international and diverse group of scholars examine, reconstruct, and evolve the constructionist paradigm in light of new technologies and theories.

The last decade has seen the rise of urban design which has taken a central position in the new agendas for urban regeneration and renaissance. Urban design has moved from marginality to mainstream. The principles espoused by urban designers over the past thirty years are now accepted as key to a better urban environment and as we move towards greater sustainability, different ideas are emerging that are challenging some of the accepted urban design norms; urban design is at a watershed. Urban Design Futures presents essays from an international cast of authors to review progress and explore emerging ideas: should urban design reflect the future rather than recreate the past? What are the new driving forces that will shape urban living and hence urban design in the future? This book explores new concepts and points the way towards a series of urban design paradigms for the twenty-first century.

Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks. Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant new, suburban form.

"Designs for Different Futures records the concrete ideas and abstract dreams of designers, artists, academics, and scientists engaged in exploring how design might reframe our futures--socially, ethically, and aesthetically. Centered on ninety-nine innovative contemporary design objects, projects, and speculations, this handbook asks readers to contemplate our cultural attitudes toward technology, consumption, beauty, and the social and environmental challenges we face on both a local and global scale in futures near and far. Thought-provoking projects are explored through interpretive texts and interviews by the designers themselves and the core curatorial team. Interspersed with the project pages are newly commissioned texts by academics, scientists, designers, artists, curators, and futurists that explore wide-ranging issues, from historical visions of the future to the use of biological/living materials in products and production processes"--Description provided by publisher.

This book discusses imaginary future generations and how current decision-making will influence those future generations. Markets and democracies focus on the present and therefore tend to make us forget that we are living in the present, with ancestors preceding and descendants succeeding us. Markets are excellent devices to equate supply and demand in the short term, but not for allocating resources between current and future generations, since future generations do not exist yet. Democracy is also not “applicable” for future generations, since citizens vote for candidates who will serve members of their, i.e., the current, generation. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the authors discusses imaginary future generations and future ministries in the context of current decision-making in fields such as the environment, urban management, forestry, water management, and finance. The idea of imaginary future generations comes from the Native American Iroquois, who had strong norms that compelled them to incorporate the interests of people seven generations ahead when making decisions.

In times of crisis, mutual aid becomes paramount. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, new forms of sharing had gained momentum to redress precarity and stark economic inequality. Today, a diverse array of mutualistic organizations seek to fundamentally restructure housing, care, labor, food, and more. Yet design, art, and architecture play a key role in shaping these initiatives, fulfilling their promise of solidarity, and ensuring that these values endure. In this book, artist Marisa Morán Jahn and architect Rafi Segal converse about the transformative potential of mutualism and design with leading thinkers and practitioners: Mercedes Bidart, Arturo Escobar, Michael Hardt, Greg Lindsay, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Ai-jen Poo, and Trebor Scholz. Together, they consider how design inspires, invigorates, and sustains contemporary forms of mutualism—including platform cooperatives, digital-first communities, emerging currencies, mutual aid, care networks, social-change movements, and more. From these dialogues emerge powerful visions of futures guided by communal self-determination and collective well-being.

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.