![]() As Clive Dilnot has argued, “Modernity is defined by the creation of the future as compensation for the loss of the organic continuity of the past. Starting from zero, modernity’s quest for the new leapfrogged the theretofore incremental evolution of ordinary objects the slow, sometimes generational refinements and improvements to objects accelerated, and whole new categories of things without precedent emerged. In its break with history, modern design formed a natural alliance with futurity predicated on a rejection of the past. Yet design’s propensity for future-making is more than just a by-product of its capacity to birth what does not yet exist. Yelavich and Barbara Adams (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 12. As Susan Yelavich has declared, “Design is always future-making.” Susan Yelavich, introduction to Design as Future-Making, ed. Design attempts to script the future by projecting its desires (and those of others) forward in time. In this way design is both propositional and prospective-it offers renderings and mock-ups, schematics and drawings, and instructions and code in the hope of instantiating a future. ![]() In the process of illustrating ideas, fabricating models, drafting plans, or prototyping solutions, designers shape what does not yet exist. Sythoff, 1961), 101.Īll acts of design are themselves small acts of future-making. 2, Iconoclasm of the Images of the Future, Demolition of Culture, trans. Polak, The Image of the Future: Enlightening the Past, Orienting the Present, Forecasting the Future, vol. Polak, The Image of the Future, 1961 Fred L. Images of the future are images of the totally other, and they are revolutionary and radical in nature, or they are nothing at all. We are now being called upon to radically undo these scripts, for instance, to “defund the police” and “decenter whiteness.” But to effectively defuture the future course of Western civilization we must produce alternate realities, imagining and instantiating other futures-for instance, Black and white, indigenous and immigrant, global South and global North. Both events have dramatically illuminated an impulse to “defuture the future” by exposing the many failings of the systems that have been created to perpetuate the status quo-a pernicious form of futurity that is simply an act of extending the present. As crowds took to the streets to demand justice and monuments of oppression fell to the ground, we saw a glimpse of an alternate cultural future. As the world went still and the massive global movement of people and goods and the burning of fossil fuels slowed, we saw a fleeting glimpse of an alternate ecological future. This essay was written before the introduction of a novel coronavirus into the human population that would create a global pandemic in 2020, and before the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis that would catalyze a worldwide quest for racial justice. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. On the occasion of the opening of Designs for Different Futures at the Walker Art Center, we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press, December 2019). ![]() Sun Ra, Morton Street, Philadelphia, June 1979.
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