Theories of the future

This week, let's look toward theories of the future - and how we can employ an intellectual toolkit to get there. How do we put things into practice - related to the Future Design Group.

Speculative Everything (ch. 9) by Dunne and Raby

Ch. 2 Theoretical Orientations in "Beyond Capital" (attaching file to page)

Design Anthropology and Participatory Design

Beyond Capital - Theoretical Orientations

• Non-essentialist, structural, ethnological explanations of social and cultural reproduction in general;

• Distinguishing systematically among the data, information, knowledge, and wisdom moments of what we will call the DIKW cycle;

• Considering humans and non-humans and their actions in the same frame, as cyborgs;

• Finding motivations for pursuing change—through multitudes, for freedom, desire, and love—in many social formations;

• Attending to futures, utopias, ethics, and being responsible.

Social Formation - more general term for society

Non-Essentialist: - non rigid thinking that suggests iteration and flexiblilty

Social formation reproduction - the conscious reproduction of social formations, reproduction is structured through the relations among the different social groups

Cultural Reproduction: the ways through which people understand, talk about, and act on their social formation. Influenced by social inequalities

Both Anti-Essentialist and Structural: In anti-essentialism, features normally considered to be part of an object’s “nature” are instead under- stood as artifacts of particular interpretive framings of actual conjunctions of contexts. The connections between structural forces and people’s immediate actions or experiences are highly mediated by the chain of material objects that populate everyday life.

Social arrangements emerge from collective, widely shared dynamics, acting on them requires an equally collective, widely shared approach.

Future studies: Future studies scholars try to answer questions about what social forms will be more characteristic of times to come and which will be less characteristic.