Imagining the Future

Let me begin with an admission. I am a designer, which means I cannot afford the luxury of cynicism. Designers are called upon to come up with solutions to problems of every imaginable description, from designing a machine to provide kidney dialysis at home to creating an interface for complex critical systems like air-traffic control. No matter what the specific nature of a project — whether it’s a park or a product, a book or a business — optimism is always central to my work. It’s as important to what I do as research tools, computer systems, or a sense of colour.

Three years ago, the Vancouver Art Gallery invited me to produce a major exhibition on the future of design. They had no fixed ideas as to what that might mean, except for the scale; they wanted something that would mark a significant commitment by their museum to the design field.

My first impulse was to say no. To discover what is happening in design around the world and to explore its potential across all the disciplines seemed too daunting. Besides, I was happily working on a full slate of projects that were already very demanding and personally rewarding.

But something was irritating me. There was something floating around in our culture that I found deeply troubling. It got under my skin until it became an itch I had to scratch. There seemed to be a growing split between reality and mood, a conflict between what is actually happening in the world — what we are capable of, what we are committed to, what we are achieving — and our perception of how we’re doing. The prevailing mood feels dark, negative, harrowingly pessimistic, and tending to the cynical. Bizarrely, this kind of negativity has become the vogue even in creative fields, which are traditionally committed to vision, beauty, and pleasure, to notions of utopia — to possibility, in other words. This is especially true in design. How, I wondered, had the virus of pessimism crept into the one area of art that is charged with looking forward?

First and foremost, design is committed to a better, smarter future. It’s the art form pragmatically focused on finding solutions for how we live in the world. But it seems we have mistakenly conflated the word “critical” with the word “negative” and embraced a cynical perspective. Art speaks mostly in dystopian terms, while business is charged with envisioning our future. Today the talent to make beautiful paintings is a bus pass to the suburbs of art discourse; cranky architects scowl from magazine covers and moan, absurdly, about their powerlessness. Gloom and doom are everywhere.

These days, to express optimism in educated company suggests that you are either wilfully ignorant of the facts or simply a fool. To be serious, to be critical, to have a voice, we have to be cynical. To strive for something — something better — is a Pollyanna project for the naive.

In stark contrast to this prevailing wind of negativity, the experience of the team that worked with me on Massive Change (as the Vancouver project came to be called) was quite the opposite. In the face of global challenges — and there are many of unprecedented seriousness, from the aids disaster in Africa to the environmental impact of our growing population — we nevertheless witnessed action coming to bear on almost every significant problem. We saw new possibilities in collaboration and connectedness, which, along with the Internet, would allow designers around the world to draw on knowledge and expertise that had never before been accessible.

My experience with this project has been delightful, with one startling exception: I discovered how controversial optimism can be.


Despite our collective despondency, we live in a time when more people are richer, healthier, better educated, more literate, and more productive. We live longer, travel more, and enjoy greater access to knowledge and freedom than at any other time in human history. Worldwide, we now number more than six billion people — partly because we are able, with varying degrees of success, to sustain that number. We have beaten back the Malthusians.

And there are other victories worth noting: