[Julian Bleecker deconstructs some of the endless “kitchen of the future” design exercises](http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2011/05/14/kitchen-of-the-future/) and comes away with some interesting insights for better conceptual design.
> I wonder about the various settings and contexts used to re-imagine what the world might be like in the future. Often times those contexts, objects, environments are associated with what wealthy people would like for themselves in order to drive sales of new stuff…
> Big change — those things should be consistent with the real, global, epic-scale challenges to living in the near future world — which have nothing to do with a refrigerator that lets you know you need more damn milk…
> This idea of every-increasing efficiency would be consistent with the Jetson’s kitchen from the old fantastic cartoon…
> I think this example of [the Ikea kitchen](http://www.designtaxi.com/news/32760/IKEA-Unveils-Kitchen-of-the-Future-and-it-s-Alive/?page=4) also embodies the challenges of future-fying anything well. Too much fetish of the object and very specific, naive and — old fashioned — ideas about what people want in the future. ((Isn’t that ironic.))…
> It drives me nuts that entities with the ability to bring about real, substantive change in the world bother to spend their money with this crap that’ll just be torn down after the annual investors meeting or the stupid trade show is over.
My takeaways: don’t stop at the generic, everyday solutions when you’re wielding your futurist tools. Take your powers to the world’s real problems or bring the world’s real problems to everyday objects (as Julian writes, a typical kitchen could be an interesting place to explore issues like climate change, water and energy scarcity, civil turmoil, etc). IDEO did this well with their [Living Climate Change](http://www.ideo.com/work/living-climate-change) series.
And no more smart refrigerators, please. We get it already.
“Futurists perform a quirky, but necessary, task in modern society: we function as the long-range scanners for a species evolved to pay close attention to short-range horizons.” – Jamais Cascio.
I love [this contest idea](http://designforthefirstworld.com/):
> Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems.
While my lovely wife works tirelessly to help the rest of the world develop, I’m working in the “first world” to make sure there’s a worthwhile and sustainable lifestyle for them when they arrive. The current example we’re setting in the U.S. (low rankings on [health](http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html), [happiness](http://www.happyplanetindex.org/explore/global/index.html), and [world respect](http://www.scribd.com/doc/24369375/Reputation-Institute-Country-Rep-2009-Complimentary-Report)) doesn’t seem like a worthy goal for the rest of the world.
Efforts like [Design for the Other 90%](http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/) are valuable and important, but I love that designers from that 90% are trying to help us too.
> “The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile’s storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine’s self-starter. Thereafter, our ‘main engine,’ the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy.” – Buckminster Fuller.
I’ve thought similar things about a lot of situations: taking a sabbatical, for instance, isn’t sustainable, but it can recharge the storage battery, and power the setting up of new practices that are sustainable. Booster rockets are another analogy–you can’t use them forever, but they can help you break free of gravity. It’s important that we use fossil fuels, booster rockets, and sabbaticals to set us up for when they’re gone.
It seems that if you hope to design things that cut to the heart of the human experience, you’re better off drawing inspiration from classical stories and literature than contemporary work. Something that remains relevant hundreds or thousands of years after its writing is a better foundation for meaningful work than the latest tech blog post.
Again: [read not the Times; read the Eternities](http://www.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=3640).
“The high-speed rail line between L.A. and San Francisco, will take twenty years, assuming there are no delays. In contrast, the first transcontinental railroad took seven. We aren’t going to build our way out of this highly congested world. It’s going to choke us.” – Kazys Varnelis on the collapse of complex societies
“To own or possess is to monopolize the use of something permanently. Hence the need to possess betrays a degree of insecurity. Possession is a way of ensuring access to whatever it is we want to use or enjoy: we are so anxious that the object be there when we want it that we are willing to insist that it be there even when we don’t want it.” – Philip Slater, Wealth Addiction
