New Design Firms — Week 1
This semester (Spring 2016), I will be teaching a section of the New Design Firms class in the Strategic Design and Management masters program at the Parsons School of Design. Drawing on my work as co-founder and creative director of Foossa, a community-centered design consultancy, I will be adding my own perspective on the common curriculum for the course.
In this course, students will be introduced to the conditions of the new design service- and experience-oriented firms that are subsuming traditional consulting practice. These novel conditions in turn present opportunities, challenges, and a new mandate for leadership and innovation: how should one design, manage and improve those design firms? How should their strategy, structure, scale, scope, and social position be defined? Students will investigate various aspects and angles of the ongoing transformation of these firms; they will present research and critique/commentary via seminal works in the field.
The students from the class and I will be blogging here in this Medium publication about our insights and experiences. I will also be sharing the readings and references for the class here.
The first module (weeks 1–5) of the class explores the intersection between design and futures/futurism. How do we predict future scenarios? How do we design for the future? And how do we design the future? We will be designing scenarios and crafting stories that bring our personal and collective futures to life.
After a series of warm up activities to get to know each other and to get into sharing/storytelling mode, we took a look at the relationship between science fiction and designing futures.
Science fiction has a history of predicting technological innovations, like in this Star Trek example below:
Now let’s look at the Jetsons:
What’s “futuristic” about The Jetsons, and what isn’t? The Jetsons debuted in the early 1960s, and looking back from 2016, it looks positively retro-futurist. Isn’t funny how they have robot maids and flying cars, but still use paper cash money for Jane Jetson to go shopping at the mall?
The Jetsons are a kind of linear future; they are basically a 20th century middle-class white US American family projected into the future with advanced technology. But the show’s vision for the future doesn’t really take into account the massive social and cultural changes that might result from such advanced technology.
As Clay Shirky puts it in Here Comes Everybody:
Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies — it happens when society adopts new behaviors.
In contrast to the linear future scenario of The Jetsons, Jason Silva challenges us to think about feedback loops and exponential futures in his “burst” and video about ontological design. In the video, Silva also revisits Marshall McLuhan’s assertion, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
While our tools have a causal effect on our behavior and on our culture, that effect is not always deterministic. Similar technological situations could result in very different scenarios. Take for example a comparison between Star Trek and Star Wars.
Faster-than-light space travel in both series allows for scenarios that involve diverse, interplanetary characters. But neither series questions the effects of faster-than-light travel on the experience of time (i.e. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity), something that the future scenario depicted in Interstellar does address.
Star Trek and Star Wars both have similarly advanced artificial intelligence in their story worlds, but the scenarios are different. Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is assimilationist, an android (initially) without emotion who wants to become more human. Meanwhile, the droid C3p0 in Star Wars is a cowardly and emotional, but clearly segregated as an artificial life-form with no known aspirations of becoming human.
In short, in science fiction, technology affects narrative possibilities and outcomes, just as our designed environment affects our social and cultural realities. But “affect” is not the same as “determine.”
Many futures are possible. Some are probable. Some are desirable. This semester we will build out these future scenarios through the lens of storytelling, design, and business models.
Assigned Readings
- Wendell Bell, An Overview of Futures Studies
- Stuart Candy, Design for the Next Context
- Eileen Gunn, How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
- Bruce Sterling, The Origins of Futurism
- Trevor Haldenby, Bringing the Future to Life
- Kees Dorst, Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design (pages 1–21)
Additional References & Inspiration
- VSAUCE, Messages for the Future: video about designing for distant future scenarios
- Ken Eklund, Jane MacGonigal, et. al., World Without Oil, a “serious game for the public good” to model a post-fossil fuel future.
- E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops, A story published in 1909 that predicts inventions like the internet and telepresence.
- Ezio Manzini and Jégou François, Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life (Summary here), example of sustainable design futures
- Goldman Sachs, Virtual & Augmented Reality Report, real-world example of how the investment industry uses forecasting and futurism.
