Il futuro desertifica / La vita ipotetica / Qui la vista era magnifica / Da oggi significa / Che ciò che siamo stati non saremo più – Baustelle (The future desertifies / The hypothetical life / Here the view was magnificent / From today it means / That what we have been will be no more)Design HustlerFor some time now I’ve plunged, against my better judgement, into the abyss of LinkedIn, and I’m not even sure why. The first time I had ventured there, several years ago, the reason was clear: I wanted to understand the workings of the platform in relation to the behaviour of its users. The investigation resulted in a chapter in my book Entreprecariat, where I argued that LinkedIn was the social network par excellence because it embodied, in the most blunt and ruthless manner, the competitive logic existing, albeit concealed, in all other social networks. At the time, however, I believed that designers did not take “the parents’ social media platform” too seriously and preferred other channels for finding work and sharing ideas.I was wrong. There’s a type of designer who straddles user experience and service design on one side and academia (somewhere between systems thinking and speculative design) on the other, posting content that resembles Instagram motivational quotes in both length and quality. People (Designers?) who have worked for Google or IDEO, or who have launched some very expensive summer schools dedicated to more-than-human design and now propose drab rehashes of already worn-out ideas, ideas whose vitality has been sucked out by countless artistic-academic manifestos. One among many: friction as a positive quality of interactions, as a mindful moment of awareness—only to indulge in an unearthly rage when Gmail doesn’t load for half a minute. This is how we go from Luna Maurer’s performance Emoticons Don’t Have Wrinkles, powerful because it embodies friction literally, as her yellow-painted face is projected in tremendous enlargement throughout her performance—to a banal motto slapped onto a lazy Canva template.But the key concept that seems to bind together these design hustlers—hustlers because their exceedingly obvious self-branding activity confirms the previously stated thesis about the importance of LinkedIn—is that of the future, or rather futures, strictly in the plural and strictly preferable. Corollary to this notion is the category of imagination, often endowed with the radical attribute: a faculty to be unleashed against our tomorrow. Indeed, many design hustlers call themselves futurists or futurologists, but I prefer to call them late futurists. To elucidate why, I will have to go on at great length, and for this I apologize in advance.Requiem for a DreamFirst, a confession: I have a hard time taking the whole conceptual scaffolding that supports preferable futures and the radical imagination seriously. Of course, just as there are, within this system of ideas, naïve and simplistic variants, there are also more subtle and elaborate ones; but my skepticism invests its fundamental assumption: the belief that the future, whether conceived as singular or multiple, lies further along the timeline; that the future is what, in a more or less predictable, more or less surprising, more or less controlled way, has yet to happen. Sadly, the future is not that, or rather is no longer that. From my point of view—and not only mine, as I shall show today, the future is nothing more than a mode of existence of the present, a style; to put it more bluntly, a senescent idea that drags on to us. It has not always been so: in the 1950s the future possessed a spatial concreteness that stood as a guarantee of the temporal one. It was within sight: all one had to do was to look up to the sky and observe the moon. That natural satellite was the future, and our distance from it, measurable in miles, also represented a temporal distance. However, the future as a ‘’world to come’’ came to a halt once we set foot on the Moon. As a matter of fact, it was already staggering. According to J. G. Ballard, “science fiction has always departed from the principle that the environment is dynamic, that changes were taking place in it, until the recent period. Now, the idea of the future is almost dead. No one plans 1995 the way people planned the future during the 1930s. The past, like the future have been annexed to the present.” Ballard places the breaking point at the end of World War II: “Probably the first casualty of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the concept of the future. I think the future died sometime in the 1950s. Maybe with the explosion of the hydrogen bomb.” The point, however, is not so much to identify the precise decease date as to make up one’s mind once and for all to hold a funeral.Ballard was perhaps the first to address the mourning but certainly not the only one. In 2013, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi described the “slow erasure of the future,�

A directory of people working at the intersection of biology and creative disciplines.

This primer, co-authored by the NSC Futures Hub team, provides an overview of Futures methodologies and their practical application to policy development and advice.