Institute For The Future

Signifying the future

In a recent talk at IDEO, Daniel Pink talked about taking a drawing class. The teacher asked them to begin by drawing a self-portrait. As he tells the story, the teacher described his as not a self-portrait, but a collection of symbols that signify a face. He hadn't drawn his real eyes, nose, lips, etc., but rather symbols that show where on the face those features appear. The challenge with drawing, the teacher explained, is to move from just drawing symbols, to drawing real things.

Futurists, I think, face the same challenge. Linear projections of the present don't really work, as everyone knows. Serious thinking about the future also can't be complete fantasy; it needs to be grounded in fact and transparent in its assumptions. It also can't just involve manipulating symbols of the future-- things that have come to signify "the future," and which you can either drop into forecasts for filler, or feel compelled to include because readers expect them. (Whenever I start talking about nanotechnology, for example, I worry a bit that I'm making an expected rhetorical move in a discourse about the future, not really talking about nanotechnology.)

This issue came to mind when my colleague Jason showed me a gallery of "covers from the future" put together by the Magazine Publishers of America. The MPA is trying to make the point that while lots of other things will change-- we'll have robot servants, levitating bathtubs, floors made from smart materials from Pluto-- magazines are still going to be around. Part of the gallery is a set of covers from the 22nd century of today's magazines-- Seventeen, Travel and Leisure, Entertainment Weekly, Car and Driver, and others.

The gallery is technically slick, very pretty, and overall quite well-done. And for me, it's really fascinating as a petting zoo of futures symbols. Almost every cover rolls out one or another technology that isn't so much a prediction (though they may influence the way we think about the future, and may inspire some to work on particular technologies) as a Symbol of the Future-- or more specifically, a Symbol of Futurism, an flashing sign that says "thinking about the future happening here!"

The first: robots. Several cover mockups-- including People, Cosmopolitan, Time, Fortune, and Entertainment Weekly-- have robots. Specifically, buxom female robots, a la Metropolis.

Asimo, I hasten to point out, looks nothing like this.

Another recurring Symbol of the Future involves babies and science-- either babies and the double helix, or Reader's Digest's Fetus in Space collage hearkening back to the Star Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (a move whose future seems more remote than ever).

Finally, there's my all-time favorite, the personal jet pack, a technology that's been just over the horizon for forty years now.

The serious point is that these suggest just how hard thinking creatively about the future can be. Still, the appearance of these symbols should immediately call into question the appearance of anything that claims to represent the future. And yet, because they're so well-known, they've become an irresistible visual shorthand for The Future, and are likely to be with us for some time.

At least until the future actually arrives.