Thread by @RohanIrvine

Next talk is Bridgette Engeler — Designing for tomorrows

#UXAustralia #UXA2019

It's a pretty dark world at the moment. Bridgette is a dystopian futurist.
She has a degree in foresight.

Bridgette is a professional futurists so she won't be talking about these topics.

We have agency and power as designers even if we don't know it.

Design had the opportunity to do stuff.

There's a healthy skepticsm that we should be using when we approach the world at large.

We are stronger at using the terminology rather than behaviours that impact change.

Are you aware about the impact you have travelling?

Until we have a shared language about expressing our possible futures we're never going to get there.

These are not just challenges for design but design can have a significant impact.

Design is one of the things that has got us to the world we have today.

We work with images of futures that don't exist.

The used futures: images of futures that are dragged down from the past.

There are the futures we discard, images of the futures that we don't want to happen.

Flat-pack futures are about the things we have now but more.

There is some else's problem futures and business as usual futures.

We are in a post growth, post human world.

We need design for non humans.

We don't have coffee for much longer.

We don't have chocolate for much longer.

We don't have sand for much longer.

Sand is a building block for progress and we're not going to be able to produce our technology soon.

Where you won't be able to grow wine by 2050

Global overshoot day is the day in the year where we have consumed the resources for a whole year.

We usually got it middle of the year :/

How we think about the futures

If we want a particular future to happen we have to design it.

If we don't want to have a future happen we have to design it out.

If we're concerned about the impact of something we have to make decisions so it doesn't eventuate.

We get our images from the stuff around us.

If we need to think of alternatives futures we need to have images of those futures around us.

A lot of us get briefs that we need to design things to make money for the next quarter.

The short termism can come from those we work with.

When we're designing for people we need to think about that particular future context and consider what inputs you have access to.

Look at what else is happening around the world.

We need to anticipate the unexpected and visualise those futures.

We like the stuff that doesn't push us and challenge us.

We like to be comfortable.

What can be imagined can be created.

Doing things fast will get us to something, but you need the time to think in between.

The future doesn't exist.

We have to create it.

The most ridiculous ideas are the most useful.

So how do we avoid being business as usual?

Most work in design is quite short term.

We need to think about longer time horizons and ask better questions.

If I ask you to close your eyes for 30 seconds and imagine a future, how many of you are going to have the same vision of the future?

What I want in a future is not necessarily the one you want and we need to acknowledge there are different needs and perspectives.

Y2K didn't happen, because we did something about it.

Be pragmatic

Complexity has always been the norm, we just haven't been aware of it and design theory has been the way we have uncovered and interrogated it.

Don't assume.

The same things we were told were going to change everything have only change a few things.

What we thought was important in 2009 will probably have disappeared in 10 years.

Think about how a future might emerge and make choices around what's coming up and make decisions.

Be mindful of the "this will never happen"

The future can be there, strong and beautiful.

If we do something about it.

If you're building foresight and longer term thinking ask your client/stakeholder to imagine what the environment will be like 3+ years beyond the delivery date.

We need our clients to be thinking about these things.

Read more broadly. Have a look at Afro futures and Asian futures. We ourself on parts of the world that don't align with what Australia needs.

@incognitosum

Question from the audience: one of the things I've grappled with, as a designer it's incumbent upon us to get people to think long term, strategically I only want to work for ethical organisations, but is that stopping me from having impact?

Answer: Don't think the work you're doing on a good project offsets bad work you've done. But you have to make the least bad decision. Plan for the change. Think about your future.

@threadreaderapp unroll me!