Afterword

Indulge me for a moment, because this may be adjacent to what you expected as an afterword for a field guide to the field of design futures.

A week ago I watched children play in a field of sorts—in the light, breezy woods just 200 meters inland from the protected shore of one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Their games were ludic insanity. They made no distinction between what was possible and what was impossible. A stick was Neptune’s trident; a massive tree stump cut down about knee height became a dais upon which one called the gathered tribe to order; a steep incline led up to a high vantage point from which all below was the entire world itself.

This is what imagination looks like when it is not disciplined by method or certification. It is unreasonable, odd, wondrously improvisational. It is also entirely sufficient to the task of exploring possibility.

We might remind ourselves that every child is a futurist, yet they do not call themselves such, do not bestow honorifics upon themselves for that; they have no method, no canonical texts, no prizes for most nor best.

I’ll offer you one additional bit of nonsense to help frame my remarks: John Carpenter’s cult classic “They Live” (1988).

In it, the hero-protagonist John Nada discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it really is. Billboards, magazines, and television screens are filled with hidden messages: “Obey,” “Consume,” Marry and Reproduce”, “Vacation.” The glasses reveal a hidden reality, one that challenges the status quo and invites rebellion against the forces that seek to control our perceptions, lives — our futures.

Of course the film is a metaphor for the act of seeing beyond the surface, of perceiving the underlying structures that shape our world. But it’s real crux in the context of this field guide is the 6+ minutes of a fight scene that begins with Nada asking his best friend, Frank, to see the truth of the world through the glasses. Nada pleads with Frank: “I’m trying to save you and your whole family!”

Not even with that earnest plea will Frank put on a pair of sunglasses.

His stubbornness is profound — and a vivid representation for the difficulty of seeing beyond the familiar. He would rather remain in ignorance than risk the ontological discomfort of seeing something new, unexpected and challenging to his ways of being.

In fact, he would rather have a very kinetic, bloody back alley brawl than put on a pair of plastic sunglasses and see something different.

In a similar vein, this book invites us to don our own metaphorical sunglasses and see the field of design futures not as a settled discipline but as a terrain of fragments, scattered insights, and possibilities waiting to be explored. Perhaps even give up our conventions, our certainties, our old ways of knowing, and embrace the unknown with the same unreasonable improvisation as children playing in the woods.

This book calls itself a field guide, but to what? To places of possibility, we might infer from the sensitivities and sensibilities of the contributions. But notice the semantic sleight of hand embedded in the title itself. It turns the idea of a terrain in need of a guide—“futures”—into a practice. We call it “design futures” here, a bit of meaning-making magic that goes from wonder to work.

Perhaps a little semantic excavation is warranted, because in that slight maneuver we’ve turned something requiring imagination into something that demands discipline and structure. When we transform “futures” (an expansive terrain that is multiple and generous to us in its expansive possibility even as it is punishingly difficult to conjure into existence) into “design futures” (with methodical, teachable, professionalized constraints), do we risk losing precisely what makes the territory worth exploring? The field becomes domesticated, mapped according to familiar coordinates. A typical field guide becomes a reference for reproducing what is already there.

But this is hardly a field guide in that conventional sense. If there is a field of anything this book is guiding us around, it is a field of fragments scattered across a terrain consisting of insights, reflections, musings, litanies, shards of opinions and meaningful quotes dotted across a landscape within which the reader is invited to wander and make sense of a cacophony of possible meanings and motivations.

Perhaps this fragmentary approach signals evolution rather than failure. When the landscape exceeds our mapping capacities not temporarily but essentially, fragments become fidelity and resonance rather than failure. This field guide operates more like an archaeological field journal. Just look at it! It is a scrapbook of insights, musings, quotes, reflections, drawings of shards found in sediment or dug from what might have been a settlement, all assembled to document finds whose significance emerges through patient attention rather than systematic classification.

It says: Look here, reader — you must do the connective work yourself. There are no futurists who are going to figure it all out for you, if they even ever existed beyond the carnival mentalist type. You are your own futurist. You must find the way to imagine how the fragments of possible worlds you want to inhabit come into being. And like the work itself, this act of imagining-into-being is the crux of the matter.

This archaeological sensibility — the ability to read fragments and sense patterns without demanding systematic closure — may be what the terrain of futures actually requires. Not answers, but the capacity to work meaningfully with what cannot yet be fully comprehended.

The fragments contributed herein acknowledge the exhaustion that comes from constant professional boundary-drawing: “We all have a habit of giving every new approach its own label, but does this really help or just create more silos and confusion?” Another shard: “[the] real sense of fatigue and repetition in current ideas and approaches” that creates a sense that “[p]rogress seems to have stalled.”

This fatigue may signal something deeper than professional growing pains. Perhaps the urgent work of inhabiting possibility has slipped away while we’ve been building methodologies, erecting frameworks, and posturing opportunistically. We try desperately to call ourselves “futurists,” “design futurists,” or “futures designers,” as if these permutations help with the actual work of finding ways to inhabit what could be. When what we really want to do is the work itself and to point and say “that…that is what I do.” The explanation is embedded in the work itself, the process. The outcomes are the reason to do the work. To quote the poet felon Michael Cherrito: “Well ya know, for me, the action is the juice.”

Futures work aspires, as Ursula K. Le Guin once put it, to help us become “realists of a larger reality.”

What this means is that the ways, means and languages we have today of making sense of what could be are nowhere near big enough for this terrain of possibility. We need not just new vocabulary in the pedestrian sense, but entirely different forms of meaning-making. New more expansive ways of sensing into and making sense out of possibility such that can evoke generative reflection without demanding resolution.

This work requires imagination over structure: a willingness to accept enchantment, wandering and wondering, curiosity, and the broad, discipline-crossing instincts of the generalist rather than the narrow focus of the specialist. These are the qualities that allow one to venture into expansive terrain with the knowledge that the language we have today is not big enough to comprehend that which could be.

The terrain of this guide is the future, but not as a singular destiny, nor as a problem to be solved, but as a space scattered with artifacts of possibility, risk, and wonder. It is difficult to inhabit, harder still to speak of, and nearly impossible to translate for those whose feet remain firmly planted in the old ways of knowing. Yet the work is to carry fragments back across the bridge, so that others may glimpse what lies just over the horizon.

This field guide’s greatest strength is that it preserves the archaeological imagination before it gets buried under professional apparatus. It reminds us that perhaps the real work was never about building a coherent discipline, but about cultivating the sensibility to work meaningfully with fragments.

Call it nothing, if you wish. Names are secondary. What matters is the adeptness with which we move across this terrain, the imagination we dare to exercise, and the fragments we leave behind for others to pick up, examine, and carry forward. That is the work of a field guide: not to tell us what to see, but to remind us how to look, and to do so with the same unreasonable improvisation as children playing in the woods, transforming fragments into portals to adjacent worlds we cannot yet name.