Think Tank
Bespoke futures: Media design and the vision deficit
Table of Contents
The future as a client
In a global economy, when the nationalist impulse is either outmoded or suspect, I propose a new mode of design education, one that can in fact be carried over into designers’ professionals practices. Why not posit the future itself as one of the designer’s chief clients? More than that, why not pick a better future as that client?
Let’s think of the future as either a pro-bono client or a partner in an entrepreneurial enterprise. Both of these strategies take payment, or even profit, off the table at least for the time being. Taking the future as a client also gives the designer a certain space to breathe. The future is one client that can legitimately claim the right to all of the designer’s time and creativity.
All well and good you might say, but how can we adopt the future as a client, what methods are available to us? One that I have been exploring is scenario planning, or, as I'll explain later, the development of bespoke futures. Over the last quarter century, far-sighted multi-nationals have institutionalized scenario planning to ponder upcoming conditions and their effects on long-term profit and loss. Some of the better known successes of the scenario planning process were Royal Dutch Shell’s ability to plan successfully for expansions and contractions of global oil demands after the price shocks of the 1970s, the ways that scenario planning by the South African government under apartheid enabled them to contemplate a peaceful turnover of power to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, and the development of the American garden tool and lifestyle company Smith & Hawkins in the 1990s, which came out of their analyses of the growing economic market for aging, property owning, baby-boomers. Scenario planning often identifies five key driving forces at the outset: Society, Technology, Economics, Politics, and the Environment.
Figure 3: Scenario generating on a whiteboard from the MDP’s Bespoke Futures seminar/studio.
I’m interested in taking this corporate scenario planning and subverting its methodologies, audiences, and outcomes, creating what I call bespoke future. The term “bespoke” comes to us from the 17th Century, when tailors held their own stocks of cloth. A customer would come in and choose the fabric for his suit, and then the tailor would then mark off the requisite length of material, referring to it as having “been spoken for.”
These bespoke futures go beyond profit and loss statements, to create an opportunity space for the imagination, enabling individuals and independent groups to create visions of the future that inspire them. The point is to move from P&L to V&F—profit and loss to vision and futurity—from ROI to ROV –the Return on Investment to a Return on Vision.
So, how are we to craft these custom-made futures? I follow a Situationist strategy and detourne Peter Schwartz’s influential and popular book on the process, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, which distills the scenario and strategy work that his consultancy, the Global Business Network (or GBN), has been involved with for decades.
