Bespoke futures: Media design and the vision deficit
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Strategically hopeful
It is one thing to talk about the possibility of bespoke futures, quite another to offer models of the process, to get past that “mutants in the Rose Bowl” default I started out with. As a post-script, I’ll describe the process of the mixed seminar/studio I lead every Spring in the graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design on precisely these issues.
To get things started, students meet in groups of two or three to generate two words per group that describe or emblematize a future that they (both or either collectively or individually) would actually like to live in. They come back together and sketched out in whatever media they wished some sort of visualization of the words they’d generated. There are no preconceived notions of how this should look, feel, taste, smell, or experience. All that was requested was to move from the realm of the textual to another set of senses (most likely visual).
Throughout the weeks, we come back and look at each others’ words and scenario-ettes, and use each iteration in a series of feints and counter-feints to envision that future we’d like to live in.
My first mandate to the students was that I want no images of burning oil fields. One student, from Tanzania, who now works in Dubai, started with: an oil field on fire. He said he had to, just to get it out of his system.
Figure 4: The forbidden yet impossible to do without apocalypse of oilfields on fire. MDP student Aunali Khimji.
He then moved on to rocks that served as memory storage units planets that are as routers on a truly intergalactic network and an infinite alphabet, created in the hopes of allowing everyone to more fully communicate with each other. That was a future that he, as an ethnic Indian, who had grown up in East Africa, and whose family had converted to Islam less than one hundred years ago, really wanted to see.
Figure 5: Stones as repositories of memory, MDP student Aunali Khimji.
I am not so foolish as to claim that this process will by its nature yield progressive ends; the same methodologies could result in bespoke futures that would strike me as far worse than our present. But why not try to use digital technologies and media design to craft cultural strange attractors, magnets for the imagination that can enmesh their users in a better, more hopeful, and more meaningful set of futures. More and more, I've come to see meaning as the central concern. How can we ensure that all these phenomenal machines and pervasive infrastructures we've invented—the computers, the networks, the nifty little portable devices, the augmented spaces, the interactive entertainments, the list goes on—actually hold and develop complexity, rigor, and meaning? Crafting a compelling set of bespoke futures may indeed lead to an activist position. Enabling people to make meaning with these objects and systems will be central to a society that refuses to equate citizens with consumers.
Schwartz writes that “there is a hunger for another set of visions of a possible society,” but what’s missing in the scenarios laid out in The Art of the Long View is precisely that vision, that X factor that creates the future. Schwartz discusses the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious, and talks about images as the link to the unconscious, but he doesn’t move to the next step and see the production of images as central to setting that unconscious free. What the design fields bring to scenario planning is precisely the power to take discussion and animate it as vision, as interaction, as environment. Not only that, bespoke futures engage with the very essence of the design process, the crafting of potentialities out of the imagination, and their eventual realization—or at least virtualization—in the world. If there’s one thing we ought to be able to do, it’s to train a new generation of visionaries, of young people who not only can imagine a better future, but can visualize and design it.
Finally, I’d like to stress two things. The word “bespoke” has a commercial cast to it, and it’s precisely that connection to design and the market that I am trying to engage, rather than falling back on the exhausted tropes of oppositional avantgardism. Second, although I’ve stressed aiming high, choosing one future and working towards it through this bespoke process, I want to make it clear that this work would be taking place in a wired world, one in which these unique shards would add up to multiple sets. I’m not talking about a singularity of utopian vision, but instead a networked purality of vision, a plutopia as I call it, better suited to this century, this millennium.
Where to go from here
For further investigation, check out the following resources:
- Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, New York, 1991 – 1996).
- The Global Business Network www.gbn.com
- Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, Design by Lorraine Wilde (MIT Press/Mediawork Pamphlet, 2005)
- Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (New York: Random House, 1992).
