Building shared desirable futures through design

Design and future are closely tied concepts. The latter is, at the same time, raw material and territory of the former. When you design something, you project yourself towards the future in a fragmented and speculative way. Futures are never ready or clear: they need to be framed. An individual or an organization that undertakes in the development of a new product or service, inevitably incorporates in its proposal a particular view of the world that it would like to experience and in which such a project makes sense to exist.

Likewise, when companies (especially those that deal with innovation and technology) propose visions and scenarios for ten, twenty or even fifty years from now, they are not trying to guess the future, like a clairvoyant. What they seek in those initiatives is the materialization of a desirable world in which more people can dwell, analyze and debate which are the points of this vision that are worth to turn into reality and which should be improved (or even forgotten).

The big issue is that, until recently, thinking, discussing, and deciding what desired futures need to be brought to reality, have always been the privilege of a few.

The pandemic opened this up to the point where it was impossible to ignore social inequalities related to the economy, race and gender. The role of ethical and innovative organizations in the face of this complex and chaotic scenario that we all face is to understand the urgency of considering voices previously ignored in these processes of building desirable futures.

Only then will we be able to propose futures in which, yes, consumer needs are met and the financial sustainability of the organization proves to be viable. But, at the same time, they must also consider the origins of raw materials, the needs of the ecosystems in which the organization operates or even the pain of those who suffer from the effects of discarding what we have created. In short, we need projects of the future more just, empathic, and democratic.

Companies that ignore the impact of their products on the environment, treated their employees as simple replacement parts or pursue aggressive and unrealistic growth goals in opposition to any ethical reflection on the effects of such belligerence, could be prepared for all sorts of pre-Corona futures. But we all know that such futures have become a remote past of a normality that no longer exists.

Article originally published in Abinforma magazine (July 2020)