Understanding what it Means to Design for Emergent Futures

Abstract

Few written reflective exercises about design in 2020 will not contain a reference to the current global pandemic we are witnessing in every single corner of the planet. A tiny virus is becoming one of the biggest challenges for humanity for the last 100 years, and while science is trying to control and defeat it, it keeps teaching us so many lessons in the form of paradoxes, contradictions, and evidence of the unessential layers of complexity we have been forced to get rid of, and we might not take back in any of the future “new normals”. One of the main contradictions of our time is the fact that we need to operate in our current system in order to transform it. But our current systems operate under principles of occupation, control, and exploitation of lands and resources that once were in custody by others. The complete recognition of the underlying support values of our systems show us that we have been colonized, primarily by ourselves. We can recognize that we, as designers and consumers, are enablers of processes that go against our values and ethics, or projections about our own “self”, and that convenience ends up being more powerful than those, due to the sense impossibility of choice. We were not aware of the abundance of choices until we are forced to remove some of them over imposed restrictions, like flying in airplanes, going to public events, or something as simple as eating in a restaurant. We always had the choice to stop flying, stop eating animal proteins, and buying on Amazon. We have just imposed ourselves as a global society to follow certain patterns of consumption, and by doing that we are imposing others to serve us. Every now and then we are forced to change these patterns, either by a global pandemic, or natural events. The collapse of the balance that keeps the temperature needed for life to exist on planet earth will trigger a series of catastrophic events for the environment, and the supply chains and logistics we are depending on. Our production and consumption models are not viable, and at the current speed of depletion of natural systems, we are removing choices from our everyday life, and removing the diversity needed to keep those choices possible. In this paper, I want to escape the traditional approach to academic writing, as well as avoiding building new dogmas. Instead, I will share documented reflections about how our colonial past is where we root the current structure of relations between humans, and humans with the natural systems around them. I will also share experiences related to the work me and my team have developed in Barcelona and globally, in different projects and programs that have helped us to develop a Fab Lab that is not just about machines and technology, and programs that operate locally such as the Master’s in Design for Emergent Futures, or globally such as the Fab Academy or Fab City. Finally, I want to share intuitions about the future of learning in the design field, and how making sense and making meaning need to be part of new learning spaces at all levels (personal, domestic, community, regional, planetary), in order to accelerate the transition towards ecological, diverse, and open futures.