Nick Foster
The Future Mundane
2015
About this talk
Design projects fall into three distinct categories: now, next and future. For near-term projects the design industry has developed and refined a variety of processes, but when approaching ideas for the future, things begin to fall apart. Designers are left to wander aimlessly between science fiction cinema, futurist literature and technology digests, and it’s clear from their output that something is amiss. Current sources of inspiration have their uses, but they often pull the designer in unhelpful directions, blinding them to the realities of a world to come. The future will include spacecraft, artificial skin and self-driving vehicles, but it will also include garbage, staplers and milk. It will be, in a very real sense, mundane. You will not be a hero. You will inherit furniture. Your morning will be spoiled when your toaster fails to sync with your bread app…
Nick will introduce an approach which looks at the role of the mundane in building a view of the future, and how experimenting with format and delivery we can make the future more tangible and achievable. It’s more fun than it sounds.
