By Nicola Spurling and Lenneke Kuijer (Industrial Design, TU Eindhoven)
In 2016 I worked with Lenneke Kuijer, an Industrial Design Engineer from Eindhoven University of Technology. Through a theme of ‘Everyday Futures’ we secured funding from the Institute for Social Futures, the Commission on Travel Demand and Design United, to explore how social theory and methods could be brought to sustainable design, and how design theory and methods could be brought to sociology.
Across two years we initiated an ‘Everyday Futures Network‘ which developed to include people from academia, corporate R&D, government and non-profit organisations. The Network came together at two workshops, in Lancaster Sociology (in 2016) and Eindhoven Wearable Technologies Lab (in 2017) to consider the questions below. Findings of the first workshop were published in a special section of ACM Interactions Magazine, and in an open access book. Findings of the second workshop were exhibited at Mind the Step as part of Dutch Design Week 2017, in an artefact blog, and at Anticipation2017.
The thinking and insights of these initiatives informed a course developed by Lenneke for the Sustainable Everyday Design students in Eindhoven, and a lecture and workshop developed by Nicola for the Climate Change and Society students at Lancaster.
The work of the network can be viewed on the Everyday Futures website.
everyday futures
Future everyday life is certain to be different from today. But how is it shaped in the present? How can such processes and their implications be captured and analysed? Why might we want to intervene in and shape futures differently? and what new theories, methods and kinds of data would we need to achieve it?
Futures of work, future homes, city futures and energy futures all make assumptions about, and have far reaching implications for everyday lives that are seldom explored. Studying such assumptions can provide insight on how ideas of ‘a normal life’ and ‘the good life’ are made, materialized and performed. It can reveal the connections and contradictions between futures of multiple types and scales.
Moreover, a focus on the everyday has the potential to reveal some realities overlooked in broad future visions, including the inequalities which such visions, strategies and plans tend to (re)produce. Everyday lives vary across generations and across the life-course, across time and space, across the seasons, and across cultures and countries of the world. We think that finding methods and processes of future-making that are capable of capturing these differences, and forms of analysis that explore how they are made in the first place, is an area ripe for development.
On the Everyday Futures website you can find more information about the network, explore the workshops and events we organised, and browse the resources (an open access Book and collection of artefact blogs) that were generated in the process.
Nicola Spurling 