Angelo Chiacchio's blog

As a designer I’ve found really interesting the discussion about the role of designers in creating a vision of the future. Yesterday Patrick Gyger affirmed that we don’t have anymore a vision of the future, because we think we are living it. Indeed it is difficult to imagine the future, to predict it.

Matt Webb highlights how designers play an important role in reflecting and experimenting around the evolution of a product, of a service, of a system. But what are the tools in hand of designers to do that? Anab Jain invites us to play with tomorrow creating speculative scenarios of possible near future. The visionary “Metromatics 21th century” scenario of Frank Beau or the “Carnivore domestic entertainment robots” shown by James Auger are examples of this kind of practice.
To imagine the future we also need to know what didn’t work in the past. Nicolas Nova suggests a design strategy based on failure. We need to spot and document failures in order to not repeat them one more time. Some designers look at the prototype as a tool of conception, that leads to a more empirical design method based errors observation and progressive adjustments. Fabio Sergio believes that technology can actually be a material to sketch with. In this context the present becomes a sort of beta-version of the future we want to live in. In the picture above you can see an early prototype of a project where I tried to use a real plant as a computer input device.

So, let’s start to sketch our idea and let it grow. What we need is just a mixture of rationality and passion, of pragmatism and fantasy.

During the first intervention of this year LIFT conference, Patrick J. Gyger remarked that in the middle of the last century we were told that sci-fi literature was “extravagant fiction today cold fact tomorrow”. But if we look back at that time we can easily notice that the image of the future was more a kind of style, a leitmotif, rather than a real prediction. Examples of this stylish future are the bizarre architecture, glamour cities, flying cars.

Actually now we are living in the future of our grandparents. But the future seems to have taken a different form. Of course we’re still missing invisibility and tele-trasportation, but some of the concepts are here even if most of them have been realized without reaching their goals. That’s what Nicolas Nova calls “failures of Holy Grails”, inventions and products that didn’t success because of different reason: the technology wasn’t ready, they didn’t answer to any real need. For instance, the myth of the flying car inspired a lot of concepts like the “Airphibina” (1946) or the “Aerocar” (1949). They all failed because people didn’t really need a flying car. They just “wanted to dream about them”. Therefore in 2009 we can still see amazing old FIAT 500 running in the street instead of the flying taxi of “The fifth elemet”.

However, in Gyger’s opinion, today we’re living both the dreams and the nightmare of our grandparents. In one hand we’ve seen the dream of the tech-utopia become reality, we feel that we are living in THE future and we don’t dare too much to have a new visions of it. In the other hand we feel as living in dystopia, where technology is not longer a savior of humanity but rather the greatest threat, a danger to our private life.

Originally from India, Anab Jain is a London-based interaction designer with skills and experience in technology foresight, service design, people-centred research and filmmaking. Her work is about people and everyday life today by informed visions and design, but also about how to best design for an uncertain future in a complex world. Until recently she was design lead on a project at Microsoft Research Cambridge, which attempted to rethink notions of machine intelligence by developing product and service scenarios around biotechnology and RFID. Currently she works as a service and interaction designer at Nokia Design in London, while developing her emerging design practice ‘Superflux’. Her work has received international awards including the UNESCO Digital Arts Award, Design for our Future Selves Award and Award of Excellence, ICSID and DuPont Inc and has been shown at Mattel Toys, Apple and Intel headquarters.

She looks at LIFT as a convergence of ideas and interesting people. It is a platform for conversations and debates, a space for sharing and reflecting on our own current practices and where they intersect with other disciplines. She says “Within the context of the larger world ‘economic and environmental’ crisis that we find ourselves in, the theme of this year’s LIFT is very timely. I am hoping that it becomes a platform for not only discussing ideas around alternative, sustainable ways of building our futures, but also an opportunity to find collaborators and initiate projects that could influence collective change.”

Find out more about Anab Jain at http://www.anab.in/