“What does the future mean to you? What does it mean to design a future in your world, on your coast?” (Making Futures Prologue, 2014)
The newly launched book Making Futures is an intervention into what we normatively consider as
‘design’, and how we make different futures through many different forms of design practices.
Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future.
Laura Watts, Technologies in Practice faculty, has written part of the Prologue for this book. In the Prologue, Watts is writing as the ‘Future Archaeologist’ in conversation with two other figures.
She got involved in the book due to a performance keynote she gave at 4S/EASST 2012 conference in Copenhagen. In collaboration with Lucy Suchman and Pelle Ehn, she created a performance ‘The Design Mailboat’. Watts acted both as a poet, writer and ethnographer. She is attentive to how we can use words and language differently, to say different things and make different futures.
In the performance they considered the conference theme ‘Design and Displacement: Social Studies of Science and Technology’ and how that might be situated in Copenhagen and elsewhere. The full performace can be found here.