Remember the Future

"It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass


The future has become more immediate than ever before in modern times. The future is no longer something distant, it’s not longer tomorrow, next week or next year. With the speed that the world moves at, the rate at which we create and consume and reproduce is exceeding expectation and predictions. Causality has been for a very long time, a subject of contemplation for humans, with Aristotle’s writings being the basis for many casual theories that came after, but it seems as though there is an increased general awareness of the effect of our actions. After all, we are being reminded of them everyday, in adverts, TV programmes, books. Ariel uses the ‘Turn to 30’ [1] slogan in conjunction with pictures of the ice caps, showing how turning to thirty is a way to help reduce global climate change. Persil advertise their ‘Small and Mighty’ [2] products as a way of reducing lorry loads, explaining it in pop-up book form with a child explaining the story. The advert ends with the words ‘Every child has the right to a nicer world.’ By using this technique, the advert brings home the message that we are all responsible for our world, and that we are not only destroying it for ourselves but for future generations; that in itself is a powerful message. Whether this is simply companies engaging in some green-washing is another matter entirely, but for now it serves to illustrate my point.

Design, by it’s very nature is future orientated. Designers employ, and become, trend forecasters, trying to work out what will be the next ‘trend’ in the future, the next fad that will require fulfilment. They make their trade from creating objects for the future, for future needs, envisioning the world in terms of ‘what if?’. Sometimes this comes in the form of objects, other times it is visions for whole cities, whole new worlds. Unfortunately sometimes the transition from idea to reality is not always a smooth one, things get lost along the way. After all, there can never be one ‘Utopia’ as humans, and the world we live in is so diverse. Instead a collective hetrotopia would be fitting, but maybe we should abandon great sweeping visions of a perfect world, and leave those to science fiction writers. Such visions have already been tried and mostly they have failed; the Le Corbusier inspired Pruitt Igoe being the most famous, with Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City theories resulting in Milton Keynes. Brilliant ideas in theory, but in the harsh light of reality these programmes become places of “corruption, rioting, poverty, crime, discrimination, despair and isolation.” [3] When considering the future, the past should always be taken into account.

It seems as though the little things, the little changes, such as re-designing packaging, using recyclable materials, providing ‘Bags for Life’ at supermarkets, concentrating fabric conditioning, while not exactly earth shattering in their conception, seem to be the more sustainable and successful forms of change.

References

[1] http://www.ariel.co.uk/energy_difference.html

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIISU0rnqVE

[3] Architecture for Huamnity. ed., 2006. Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. Thames and Hudson