The Great Convergence:

Abstract

The science fiction author William Gibson once observed that ‘the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed’. It’s a good line, and one that holds for pretty much any era. As new technologies, new ideas, and new challenges arrive, they hit people and places at different rates. There is, for example, a whole industry of trend forecasting, which is deeply fascinating for its particular expertise. As if in an attempt to prove Gibson’s observation, forecasters devote themselves not to the future, precisely, but rather to the study of emergent cultural dynamics. They prowl the globe on the hunt for signs of early onset. Their prey might be something as trivial as a color (Millennial Pink, anyone?) or as profoundly transformative as the displacement of resources away from hardware and into biotechnology.

It must be said that trend forecasters are not much respected by the rest of the design community. They are seen to be ambulance chasers in reverse. I’ve met several such experts in what is around the next bend, and the one thing that they all share is a disinclination to admit that their prophecies may be self-fulfilling. Futurists are often subject to a pack mentality, and if enough of them start to predict a certain trend – well, it’s not so surprising when it comes true. Yet forecasters are just one example of professional ‘futurists’, who work for large and well-capitalized companies, attempting to spot cultural waves in time for their employers to surf them towards some still-wealthier shore. Are most designers so different?

Like many people, probably, I’ve been thinking about the future a lot recently. Given recent political developments – a series of self-inflicted disasters on the part of the USA and UK – and current assessments on climate change, it seems evident that we bear a much higher collective risk than we did just two years back. It’s a challenge for us all, and for those of us in the design world, even more so. I had the opportunity to consider this last year, when I was asked to curate Beazley Designs of the Year, an annual project at the Design Museum, London. The show was composed of over sixty international projects proposed by invited nominators (academics, critics and designers), covering six areas – architecture, product, graphics, fashion, digital and transport design.

As curator for the tenth anniversary edition of this series, I decided to emphasize the political implications of the year’s designs. One of the dominant themes of the show was the experience of stateless migrants into Europe, which prompted responses like Yara Said’s Refugee Flag (based on the colors and materials of a life jacket, like the one the designer herself wore while fleeing from her native Syria). Another was protest design, exemplified most famously by the Pussyhat Project, and also by innovative initiatives like the Protest Banner Lending Library in Chicago. It wasn’t all politics, of course. There were many other designs too, all of which engaged the future in one way or another – self-driving vehicles, digital fabrication technologies, and touch-sensitive fabrics among them. The projects that seemed most significant to me, though, were the ones developed by independent activists, artists, and makers, all of whom were taking the responsibility for change into their own hands.