Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future

Starry-eyed visions of glamorous people enjoying miraculous technology misrepresent a future reality that might be glitchier and grungier, according to this intriguing if flawed debut manifesto. Foster, a designer who works with tech companies including Google and Sony, outlines four schools of futurist prognosticating that inform government and corporate planners: “Could Futurists” are boosters for things to come, which are often showcased in “vision videos” of families beaming at their gee-whiz gadgets; “Should Futurists” lay out unduly confident road maps to an improved future based in sketchy quantitative models that are little more than “numeric fictions”; “Might Futurists” evaluate the probabilities of different and potentially clashing future scenarios; and pessimistic “Don’t Futurists” look for the complex ways in which the future will go wrong. Foster offers biting and persuasive takedowns of stale futurist tropes as a mix of sci-fi schlock and consumerist porn but stumbles in his pointed refusal to paint a clear portrait of what the future might actually look like (he suggests it will be more of “a quotidian, lived-in evolution of the present” but leans heavily on vague theoreticals: “What happens when we imagine this VR headset in Derek’s backpack rather than in the hands of a scientist in a pristine white laboratory?”). This abstract exercise may be of interest to professional designers but will disappoint lay readers. Photos. (Aug.)