“The challenge for design,” according to curator and museum director Zoë Ryan, “is to recognize market forces and political constraints while maintaining enough distance to foster the imagination and allow critical positions that can reorganize and rethink economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups using the languages, forms, and methods of design.” Here, Ryan pursues this idea through the vital work of designers Dunne & Raby, Mary Maggic, and Forensic Architecture.

What do our collective images of the future tell us about our priorities in the present? How do we design visions of the future intended to defuse other, more perilous futures? Published on the occasion of the exhibition Designs for Different Futures, this essay by designer, curator, and museum director Andrew Blauvelt examines the momentous game of catch-up that humanity must play in order to survive its own conceptions of the future.

As the founder of MIT’s Space Enabled research group, Danielle Wood is committed to advancing justice here on Earth through space-related design and technologies. Here she offers a roadmap for imagining new cosmic futures, deeply informed by histories of unjust human colonialism and unequal access to technology.

“Architects and designers are facing a new problem when they aspire to build for a habitable planet,” says renowned theorist Bruno Latour. “They have to answer a new question, because what used to be a poor joke—‘My dear fellow, you seem to live on another planet’—has become literal—‘Yes, we do intend to live on a different planet!’” In this essay Latour maps out a solar system of influences filled with seven fictional planets, exploring the disconnect between the physical lands we inhabit and the geopolitical territories that determine our freedom and agency.

“An accessible world is one that shifts the burden off of disabled people,” says Aimi Hamraie, director of the Critical Design Lab, “and also asks what the user experience of all these new technologies is, and who are they potentially harming.” Here, curator Michelle Millar Fisher speaks with Hamraie and fashion model and activist Jillian Mercado about how designers can imagine accessible futures even as people with disabilities are “surviving apocalypses that are happening in the present.”

There is a “dilemma uniting artists and many of today’s workers,” writes Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future: “flexibility and freedom on the one hand, precariousness and instability on the other. … Herein lies an opportunity for a new kind of solidarity.” In this article, Gorbis lays out a case for the necessity of art when imagining new, equitable futures, and introduces the Institute’s expanded concept of Universal Basic Assets.

By 2080, there will be more metal ore above the surface of the Earth than below. This was the starting point for Formafantasma’s Ore Streams, a project exploring the complicated relationships between large electronic companies, designers, and consumers when seeking to understand the increasingly abstract systems of production that result in enormous amounts of e-waste.

“We need to break the monopoly various state technocrats have over the production of truth,” says architect and activist Eyal Weisman. “But at the site of the ruin of that old established institutional conception of truth, something else needs to grow. The question is what that is.”

To celebrate the season of love we present this article by philosopher Srećko Horvat, who imagines a future in which romance is susceptible to the same algorithmic manipulations as our voting habits. Join him in connecting the dots between sex robot brothels, Cambridge Analytica, and dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr, and Facebook Dating.

“It is a requirement for human beings to become part of a vital community,” says architect Francis Kéré. “People will always migrate. People will migrate because of catastrophes, because of the destruction of their environment, because of their living space, even to find better opportunities. The United States is a result of migration.” To celebrate Kéré’s recent Pritzker Architecture Prize, we present this conversation with curator Michelle Millar Fisher.

In this interview, David Kirby describes how designers, scientists, and filmmakers collaborate to create “diegetic prototypes”—future technologies that exist within speculative worlds such as science fiction films—and the counterintuitive need to create open-ended narratives to successfully convey scientific truths in today’s post-consensus reality.

“[…] small, local, open, connected. These four adjectives work well in defining this scenario because they generate a holistic vision of how society could be,” says renowned social innovation expert Ezio Manzini. “At the same time, they are also readily comprehensible, since everybody easily understands their meaning and implications by looking at the prototypes and the transformative normality on which they are based.”

“I think if we single out the city as a constellation of lives and people, then we go far beyond the idea of rationalism or aesthetics to reach the poetry that lies in what a city is,” says design theorist and filmmaker Alexandra Midal. Here Midal speaks with Michelle Millar Fisher about the city as an eternal trope for the design imagination.

How does our understanding of our own products affect the way we perceive time? Through the skilled craftsmanship of traditional footwear design, Helen Kirkum creates bespoke sneaker collages, combining pieces of discarded and recycled shoes to evoke “fossils of people’s lives.” Her work has been highly influential on the reworn/patchwork aesthetic currently prevalent in the sneaker industry. 

In this Zoom conversation, biohacker Heather Dewey-Hagborg and activist Chelsea Manning discuss their collaborative projects exploring genetic phenotyping and identity, the relationships between biosurveillance and biopower, and the usefulness of speculation in a tumultuous present.

How do bodies queer at the molecular level? How is this queering inextricably tied to industrial capitalism? And is there a way out of these capitalist ruins that have been further exacerbated by the pandemic? Mary Maggic, whose work is featured in the Walker exhibition Designs for Different Futures, works within the fuzzy intersections of transfeminist hacking, body/gender politics, and eco-alienations. This workshop lecture develops their concept of “open source estrogen”: the underlying premise that hormonal molecules are ubiquitously all around us, and available for us to hack, mutate, and become-with. 

Many of the works in Designs for Different Futures utilize moving image to further illustrate the designers’ imagined worlds. To accommodate a more comfortable viewing experience outside of the gallery, here are a selection of the films featured in the exhibition from designers such as Keiichi Matsuda, Olalekan Jeyifous, Mary Maggic, Joy Buolamwini, Forensic Architecture, and more.

Memories From the Year 2030 is a collection of fictional letters, memos and visual artifacts created by a group of futurists, speculative designers, authors, and artists. Contributors include Parsons & Charlesworth, Ayodamola Okunseinde, Lisa Grocott, Radha Mistry among many others.