With a masters that includes the word “futures” in it, it was about time to talk about what that meant to each of us. This seminar, led by Andres Colmenares of IAM, was all about thinking what futures (plural) we want to remember, potential ways we could go about doing this, and speculating what that future might look like. Starting with thinking about the next billion seconds, or 31.7 years. If I have to define what futures means, I would say it = collective decisions in the present + their outcomes + aspects of randomness. I liked many ideas that Andres and my classmates presented throughout the course. 3 big takeaways I had from the first days were:
1. Imagining a billion can be seen in so many different ways. Why do we so often think of a billion in terms of money, why don’t we think of it in terms of seconds (or life)?
2. Designing for responsibility in conjunction with empathy is important.
3. Individuals thinking about futures has a broad scope- we all imagine different futures because we are all living alternate presents. Even though my classmates think very similarly sometimes, I think we all envision futures in our own way because of our unique past experiences.
Some other things that stuck with me were how Andres used the term environmental emergency instead of climate change. It shows the severity of the situation, and that it is not simply a change, which can be taken as either positive or negative. If used, it would prompt people to think and act more seriously. He also used the phrase “words change worlds”. I think this statement is really true because words hold so much power. It points at how communication plays a role in shaping the minds of people, especially from politicians and people in powerful positions that have the capacity to make such big impacts with their words. In an economic perspective, in order to at all have a semblance of a future green economy, absolute decoupling needs to take place and a strategy of degrowth has to happen. This could only be possible with the redesign of our current economic system that isn’t dependent on growth of GDP.
An aspect of the seminar I enjoyed was how we got the chance to think about our futures in concrete yet speculative ways. We did this with a variety of exercises. In one, we wrote a postcard to someone a billion seconds ago in 1990. I chose to write to my parents, which at that time, were slightly older than I am now. Writing to my parents made me think about, with the emergence of technology, how different the way we grew up really is. I wonder if they could have foreseen at all what is happening now. It was a really reflective exercise for me as well as for many of my classmates as it made me think about what is going on in the world around me today, and how to relay that to someone a billion seconds ago at a time in which I wasn’t even alive yet. We did two more speculative exercises, one where we imagined our lives one billion seconds from now, and another which entailed outlining a mayor’s speech for a future fictitious city based on a real one. Interesting patterns emerged from all of the responses. We noticed common themes of animals, little mention of family or children, local food and production, lack of capitalism, hope, and using technology for health purposes. I wonder how possible it is to turn the collective futures we wish for into the futures we create and live.
At the end of the week, some classmates and I met up for a drink and kept some discussions going. I again brought up the question: how long IS the next billion seconds? I’m not sure if I can even say if I have a good perception of it because I've lived about 725 million seconds. At first, I felt that in the grand scheme of things, not much has changed in the last billion seconds, or at least in my lifetime. Perhaps because I always grew up around tech, and everything happens so gradually and becomes a part of everyday life that it becomes hard to notice. Additionally, I think that maybe your brain is so busy absorbing information all the time that you do not have time to reflect or understand what is changing around you while it is happening. After listening to my classmates and hearing their opinions, I see now how much really has changed in the last billion seconds. The fact is that we live in a world that is extremely developed from what it was one billion seconds ago. I can’t imagine how it would have been before the technology all around us, as I have lived with it practically my whole life. To think that the same type of shift could happen/is happening currently in the span of the first billion seconds of my life is crazy. Knowing this, I need to be conscious while designing. I hope to design with the points in Andres’ manifesto. The truth is, no one knows where the world will be 1 billion seconds from now, and we probably have less control over it than we think we do. At the very least, as designers, we should be continuously reminding ourselves that what we design today will have implications past tomorrow, and past the next billion seconds.