A space to imagine a different kind of future
The brief in brief
In 2021 I knew I wanted to commit to doing more meaningful personal work.
The original idea for the design came in response to two moments. The first was a talk I saw while presenting at Service Design in Government 2020 by Cassie Robinson where she asked "what has happened to our imaginations?" and advocated for social dreaming. The second was a series of conversations I had with friends while we were on the brink of COVID-19 where we couldn't describe what impact a lockdown would have on our days let alone what a life post-pandemic might be like.
I have always believed to be true is that you can get better at anything if you commit to practising. So I developed a series of 52 questions that encourage speculative imagining. These questions make up what I've called Imagining Future Space. There's one for every day of the year or card in a deck. There are just enough to create sustained practise and or a space for play.
The process
Learning from the questions in The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness, better known as the 36 Questions that lead to love, I drafted questions get more personal and more abstract as they go. They’re designed to be a challenge. They cover small tactile things like what’s in your pockets, to more social questions about our relationships as well as bigger questions about how we’ll stay fed and healthy. They only offer imaginary snapshots of what alternative worlds could look and feel like. In order to truly imagine and design sustainable new worlds, we need to think in systems, but that’s a challenge bigger than today.
Each question comes with a random set of three conditions (some realistic, some silly) to challenge your imagination but also take away the fear of a blank page.
The complexity of this project challenged me in a way I haven’t challenged myself in a while. Whether it was writing the questions, creating 54 illustrations that were aimed to inspire fun and lateral thinking in responses, or reviving my tiny bit of coding knowledge to build my very first chatbot, putting the thing together reaffirmed that this is the kind of ambitious personal work I want to be making.
A snapshot behind the scenes of drafting questions and chatbot coding.
The final product
Imagining Future Space has already allowed me to have conversations I wouldn't have already and inspired some truly thought provoking submissions about what a radically different world might look like.
The first launch of the site is only a starting point. I want to draw on my anthropology studies at Goldsmiths and add some context to each question to show how different societies are currently creating their own alternative worlds whether that's through how they organise themselves, their environments or their .
"What I have found most interesting about this exercise is all the ways that our transportation system could be made kinder. We could do so much to make it more welcoming and fun if we put our minds to it."
— Tucker Cholvin