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Nick Foster: Could, Should, Might, Don't—a new way to think about designing for the future
00:59:26
We chat with Nick about why most futures thinking falls into one of four problematic categories, and the importance of ethics in designing for the future. We also talk about the hidden dangers of "numeric fiction" and data-driven predictions, what he learned working with PhD scientists who had never met a designer, and why Silicon Valley's obsession with KPIs is killing long-term thinking.
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- [00:02]
Nick Foster
Quite often designers like to work on a thing that has a sort of established pattern and a beginning, middle and end, and a ship date. But I think when you're exploring the future, it is an unknowable space and it will undoubtedly be filled with an infinite number of dead ends. And you have to be comfortable throwing your chest at that and saying this might be the one. But it's more than likely to either fail or not yield the kind of outputs you're looking for.
- [00:29]
Aaron Walter
Most designers are comfortable in the world of known problems. We talk to users, gather insights, and then we iterate based on feedback. But what happens when you're designing for a future that doesn't yet exist? When you're creating products for people who haven't been born, or technologies that might not emerge for years? Well, today's guest has spent decades designing for the future, a space where design specs are ambiguous at best. Nick Foster led design at Google X, where he worked on over 200 moonshot projects from flying machines to nuclear fusion.
- [01:04]
Eli Woolery
Nick has written a provocative new book that provides helpful guidance on how we might approach designing for the unknown in could, should, might how we Think about the Future. He argues that we've fallen into predictable patterns of thinking that are actually making us worse at anticipating what's coming next. We chat with Nick about why most futures thinking falls into one of four problematic categories and the importance of ethics in designing for the future. We also talk about the hidden dangers of numeric fiction and data driven predictions, what he Learned working with PhD scientists who'd never met a designer why Silicon Valley's obsession with KPIs is killing long term thinking this is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [01:45]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. @ DesignBetter. Our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [02:24]
Sponsor/Announcer
Design Better is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio.
- [02:40]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show. Nick Foster, welcome to Design Better.
- [02:49]
Nick Foster
Hello. It's nice to be here, Nick.
- [02:51]
Aaron Walter
We're excited to talk to you. You've got a really interesting new book coming out soon. It's called Could, Should, Might, how we think about the future. And we'll dive into that framework and the details in there in just a minute. I think it's good for people to know that you are someone who thinks about the future a lot and there are a lot of designers out there designing things for, but not too many people who are designing things for the future. How did you find your way into that space?
- [03:21]
Nick Foster
Well, we could talk about the problems therein in that statement, but let's get into some biography first. Yeah, it's a long story. I'm British, hopefully you can tell by my accent. But I've been in the US since 2012. I was brought up in a town called Derby, which is at the foot of the Pennine Hills in the Midlands, which is also coincidentally the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. So it was where Lom's Mill was built. And so I grew up in a sort of fading industrial town, always interested in engineering, grew up around technology as most people did in their 80s. Technology was sort of everywhere. I grew up around engineers, wanted to be an engineer, went to Brunel University, which is to the west of London, and studied industrial design. But a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design. So still sort of quite technical, quite a sort of applied engineering course. I was one of the early engineers at James Dyson's company. So when I graduated from my degree I started designing vacuum cleaners but very quickly was drawn towards the sort of new product and new product development that was going on there. And then I moved to London, went to the Royal College of Art where I discovered kind of critical speculative design. Broadened my understanding of the full role of design, I would say. And since then it's been a sort of long on ramp into more pointed futures oriented work. Beginning with doing a lot of consultancy work in London, working for FMCG companies, not so much software, but mostly hardware, mostly product type of work, helping companies think about the future. Before I took the step to move kind of in house and I began working for Sony, helping them think about future products. They might make long term sort of emerging technologies explorations and then moved to Nokia. Remember them?
- [05:09]
Aaron Walter
Oh yeah, I love Nokia.
- [05:10]
Nick Foster
Yeah, I spent a lot of time working with Nokia again working in their sort of advanced design team. You know, anyone that works in a large organization is probably familiar with this sort of lab or futures or advanced design sort of team. I did a lot of work there thinking about how we might apply some emerging technologies, how we might integrate some emerging behaviors, societal shifts, that sort of thing. And that's what brought me to the States. I helped to grow an advanced design team in Sunnyvale here to partner up with a little team we had in la. And then I left there and went to Google. I know this is a long story, but I'm trying to give you an idea of where I come from. Went to Google, started working in a very specific team looking at future operating systems and how they might yield new types of products. Before I took a role as head of design at Google X, where I was for the last, well, for about eight years up until 2023. And since then I've been writing this book and taking a well earned career break. But that's sort of the biography of me, I guess.
- [06:09]
Eli Woolery
Nick, I have a question about your early career. So my very first real design role was as a design engineer. And I know titles can mean a lot of different things, but I'm curious at Dyson if it was something similar where I sort of sat at this intersection between mechanical engineering and industrial design and I would help translate industrial design into something more manufacturable and take into design considerations. And so I think it gave me both an appreciation and sort of a vocabulary that sat somewhere between kind of creativity and more technical engineering realm terms. Is that true for that role? Did that set you on that path or different thing?
- [06:45]
Nick Foster
I mean, it's a very long time ago, Eli. Yes, though I think my job title was design engineer and it was very much a production oriented role, working in the early days of cad, trying to convert sort of design intent into physically manufacturable objects. But I think I joined Dyson at a time when it was really exploding in popularity, doing really well. And I think that's when most companies start to more pointedly think, okay, we've got over the hump, we've built an audience, we've built a bunch of customers that we like. Let's start to think more pointedly about the future. And I think I happened to join at that time when the company was very keen to think about what else it might make, not just what other vacuum cleaners it might make, but what are the products. Should they do a toaster, should they do an iron? Should they do any number of sort of consumer products? And thankfully I was drafted into some of those early projects and one that made it to production was a washing machine project that we worked on. Again, just starting to wrap your arms around what new technologies were available, what new habits and behaviors were starting to emerge, what the market looked like, what the product landscape looked like, and trying to conceive of new things that might fit into that or take over that or disrupt. That was something I found a lot of pleasure in. It sort of fed my curiosity, but it was very much a sort of an applied engineering role. And the part of the project that I worked on the most on, the washing machine project, was a gearbox, just to give you some ideas of sintered gears, you know, a lot of high torque loads and things like that. So it was very much an applied engineering role. But my father was a railway engineer and I come from that kind of stock. But it became very clear to me that I sort of had a hunger for something more. I don't want to use the term creative because engineers are wildly creative people, but something more exploratory, expressive, that felt a bit closer to people and habits than it did to materials and manufacturing. I still have a obviously keen interest in that world, but that's the reason I moved to London and started an MA at the Royal College of Art and just landed with both feet in somewhere that felt like home, you know, surrounded by ceramicists and fashion designers. My wife's a printmaker and fashion design graduate. And just being around that difference really helped me sort of switch on that more inquisitive, creative expression, expressive part of my brain.
- [09:07]
Aaron Walter
One thing I've noticed about some designers, it's not all designers. Some designers are very comfortable with ambiguity and having a very nebulous, brief, not clear sense for materials constraints, et cetera. Some people thrive and operate really well with that. There are others who really have to have things spelled out to have a sense of certainty, to be able to make progress. In fact, we talked to John Cleese and one thing that he said to us is that everybody today wants certainty. They want to know exactly what's going to happen and when and how. But so much of life is ambiguity. What's your relationship with ambiguity? And I'm curious how that ties into your design process.
- [10:00]
Nick Foster
I think I agree with you that a lot of creative people, a lot of designers, a lot of people that have to make decisions require a level of certainty that in long term futures exploration just doesn't exist. You have to be naturally comfortable with ambiguity. Ambiguity on every level as well, and unpredictability on every level as well is very important. And my relationship to that is I'm pretty comfortable in that space. I don't mind being around a lot of uncertainty. I think the role of design can be really useful in knocking the edges off. I heard somebody describe it as like tumbling rocks knocking sharp edges off and gradually giving something some form. And I think if you go into a project that has an intent to explore the long term future, and we can get into what we mean by long term, but if you go into a project with the intent to explore the long term future and everything is known and everything is certain and you're comfortable with everything, then you're probably not doing a long term futures project. Because we know that the drumbeat of change is increasing, has been increasing, and you have to become comfortable with like, we don't really know what's there, and putting a kind of X unknown there and saying actually knowing that we don't know is useful too as part of a process of moving forward, knowing what you don't know is really important and you can sort of leave that to be held and try and solve later, or you might never know and you just have to take a leap of faith. But I do agree with you that comfort with ambiguity is sort of the primary skill that you need. And when we were hiring for people at Google X in particular, we found it quite challenging to find designers who were comfortable with that level of ambiguity, who might work on things that never ship, that might only last a couple of weeks of an investigation. Because I think quite often designers like to work on a thing that has a sort of established pattern and a beginning, middle and end, and a ship date and maybe there's some updates or something later on or a version 2. But I think when you're exploring the future, it is an unknowable space and it will undoubtedly be filled with sort of an infinite number of dead ends and you have to be comfortable throwing your chest at that and saying, this might be the one, this might take us somewhere interesting. But it's more than likely to either fail or not yield the kind of outputs you're looking for. And so we kind of struggled with that actually, to try and find people that were willing to throw themselves and their energy and their positivity sort of time and time and time again at these sort of not necessarily impossible totems, but these difficult, complex things that might not result in anything.
- [12:36]
Aaron Walter
Businesses are often not comfortable with ambiguity because they've got to run a business, they've got to make money, they've got investors and they're accountable. So Google X and the work that you were doing there I think is rather unique that there's large scale projects with a lot of unknowns that are invested in, that are given a decent amount of Runway to try to solve things. Could you Maybe tell us a little bit about what that was like, having that sort of space to experiment.
- [13:07]
Nick Foster
I mean, it's a huge privilege. There's no two ways about it. I know countless people that would thrive in an environment like that and would love to be in it, but those roles are very few and far between. So from the get go, it is a privilege. I think the mistake that people make is they often feel like it's play and it's a level of freedom that they would love. But the reality of that work is you do have to try and push yourself to try and deliver things. And There are no KPIs or ROIs on a lot of this work. So it's very difficult to justify it. And I think when you find yourself in those kinds of roles, you're often sort of challenged by people who think you're in some sort of ivory tower or in some incredibly privileged position. And they, the sort of global they I'm referring to there feel like they're over in the main business making all of the money and you're over here in your ivory tower just having fun and creating crazy things. So it is a huge privilege to be in that position, but it does require a level of sort of tenacity and forward momentum that again, not a lot of people maybe have in them and being able to do things over and over again and try to really push at those, not even open doors, but just trying to find ways into conversations with new technologies and use design to try and open up those conversations. To say there was a process at X, I keep referring to it as X. We've got to be careful there because I'm talking about Google X, which itself names itself X the Moonshot factory. So I'll refer to it as Google X. Just to be clear, there was a sort of nominal process, but because of the breadth of things we were exploring, from flying machines to nuclear fusion to sort of prediction engines, you can't have a process for something like that. There has to be some level of sort of progress. But any notion of a sort of repeatable process with steps and stages just falls apart in that type of work. And I think we had a very strong culture of killing ideas quickly that seemed like they wouldn't yield the outcomes we were looking for, which was sort of major scale change, huge commercial opportunity. So we sort of had a process. I'm a little bit process allergic, if I'm honest. I find it too prescriptive. I don't want to follow a Lego manual to make the things we're trying to make because you have to take strange left turns at any moment and find yourself in these sort of bogged down months where you have to be super tenacious and really believe in something. When you have a really sort of strict, well formed process in front of you that you're trying to work through. I just don't think it gets you to interesting places. Right.
- [15:35]
Aaron Walter
That makes total sense to me. I totally understand the allergic reaction to too much process when it comes to trying to get to brand new spaces. But there are some gear shifts and I'm thinking specifically about there's this broad exploratory phase and then there's we've got something here and now we need to commercialize it. You know, history is riddled with stories of brilliant, innovative ideas that sort of died on the vine or got picked and transferred into other companies like Apple in the early days. You know, companies got to be good at commercializing. How do you think about that? Of turning something that is an R and D thing into a mainline money making product? Or is that even in the purview of your thinking?
- [16:23]
Nick Foster
Most of the work I've been involved in is what you would call early stage design work. So very, very, very far up the ideas chain, let's say, and I would say every single project is a long and rigorous and laborious translation of audacity into pragmatism. I come from quite a pragmatic background and so I don't play in the sort of fantasy world of futures. I don't play in the just imagine if kind of Jetsons, wild eyed dreaming of the future. I know people that do and it works for them, it doesn't work for me. I like to have those pragmatic conversations as early as possible. And they do involve things like commerciality, they do involve things like what are we actually talking about here? And I feel like I have a set of skills that allows me to ask those questions in productive ways without creating sort of roadblocks to forward momentum. But I do think that it can sometimes be crippling for some people to try and hold all of that in their head and say, well, hang on, we're supposed to be making a thing here at the end. So I think you have to find ways to sort of mode switch where you can have moments of open ended exploration where you're sort of open to any idea. But I think getting trapped in that space is where futures work, makes some of its biggest mistakes and can get trapped in some of these lofty but pointless explorations Let me give you an example. My team at Google X was very small. It was quite a small team of multidisciplined people and we worked typically with the earliest stage projects within Google X. So just to give you some idea, like Google X is focused on long range exploratory projects and we were involved in the earliest stages of them. So we were working with raw science, raw engineering, raw ideas, and then turning the skill sets that designers have to just start poking at, like, well, what might this yield? What sort of things might this lead to? Trying to discover what I call the grain in a technology, like where does the technology sort of want to point? What sorts of things might we make? And then using filmmaking, storytelling, prototyping to again sort of ask questions back of the inventors or scientists that we were working with and say, is this what you mean? Is this the kind of thing you're talking about? And then once we start to get agreement, like, oh, there's actually a there, there, we can start to bring in people who understand the market it might be trying to work into or understand the social constructs it might be dealing with or the financial opportunities that it might yield, those sorts of things. But very quickly my team would then back out of the project. We would help them hire their first designers or advise them on what their design strategy might be and then go back to the beginning with another team or another project or another piece of science.
- [19:02]
Aaron Walter
What did you learn from working at Google X for so many years and working on so many projects? What did you learn that you take forward in your career?
- [19:10]
Nick Foster
One of the key learnings actually is I think a lot of designers spend a lot of time with a lot of other designers and it can lead to a sort of head nodding groupthink and an agreement that's sort of not very productive. One of the things that I found quite challenging but learnt to find quite inspiring was I was around people with perhaps two PhDs who'd never even met a designer, had never opened a design magazine, didn't really know what design was, weren't quite sure why we were in the room and being able to say, you know, design is not just choosing the throw cushions on your couch. It, it's not just graphic design, it's all of these things and more. And actually we understand people perhaps in a way that you don't. We understand desire, we understand manufacturing, we understand intent, we understand logic. Not that you don't, but we can add to in meaningful ways that can help save you money, save you time, save you Going down dead ends, that suddenly you start to reframe what design is for people. That is the biggest learning for me is that design getting out of my own. I don't want to use the term bubble, but like my own social structure where everyone sort of knows what we're all talking about and it can become a bit culty. But being with somebody that spent their life trying to work on nuclear fusion, for example, and saying, hey, I'm a designer. What are we going to do together? That's fantastic, you know, really fantastic. And I think it taught me that design really undersells itself. It really does undersell itself. And design can be this much broader thing. It's. It can be a tool to help think as much as anything else.
- [20:38]
Aaron Walter
The folks you're describing, the nuclear engineers and so forth, who had no experience with design, did they receive your message?
- [20:45]
Nick Foster
I mean, it's a mix, right? There are many tales. I mean, we worked on over 200 projects during my tenure as head of design there. Again, some of them for a week, some of them for many years. Across that spectrum, you're always going to run into people who see design in different ways. There are people that sort of see design as a photocopy shop or a Kinkos, where it's like, can you give me this? Can you give me that? I need it by Friday. There are people who just think you're sort of a UX designer who just needs to sort of ship them something in Figma or whatever. There are others who don't really know anything and are keen to lean in and say, actually, like, tell me what you do. How can I use that? The company seems to put value in having you here as a resource. So tell me why that is. What can you do? It is a huge spectrum and I think there are people that I won over, or we won over who were a bit skeptical and sort of fell in love with what we did a little bit more once they understood it, and vice versa. People who liked what we did at the beginning, but maybe found less utility for it as their project changed into something else or they evolved as a leader. So I do think it's a multitude of experiences there.
- [21:48]
Aaron Walter
Well, let's talk about your book. First of all, why write a book? You've done so many different things.
- [21:54]
Nick Foster
Why?
- [21:54]
Aaron Walter
Why write a book at all?
- [21:57]
Nick Foster
I've been working nonstop since I graduated in 1998. I took a year and a half to do a master's degree, but I consider that work as well. When I left Google X in 2023. I just had this feeling that I'd been accumulating so many sort of half formed thoughts and so many sort of ideas and opinions and perspectives that were all just starting to gum up in my brain and I was sort of struggling to make sense of them. And so when I left and I took this break and I went on holiday with my wife and had a nice sort of deep breath for a few months and just started to jot down some of these thoughts and maybe they were going to become kind of medium articles or some kind of thirsty think pieces on LinkedIn or something. But it started to come out of me more and more, this building of my own thesis and my own opinion. And I'm nearly 50 now, so I've been doing this a while and there's a lot of it. I realized that I've got quite strong opinions on the ways in which we think about the future. And as I started to share some early little mini essays or little bits of thinking with some people, they were like, oh, there might be something here. And then obviously I started to build on that some more and build on that some more until it became a little unwieldy and we started to share it around with agents and other people and they said, yes, we think you've got something here. So it wasn't necessarily intentional. I didn't leave and say, I've got this thesis and I need to get it out there. It was just a process of. Without wanting to sound like some Silicon Valley self help guy, it was sort of like a therapeutic moment to just say, I've got the space and a bit of financial stability where I can take a breath, have a think about what I might want to do next, about what I actually think. When you're in this type of work, day after day after day, there's not a lot of time to just stop and think and say, what am I doing this for? What do I really think? Because you've got 100 things in your inbox and 100 things in your calendar that all need addressing right now. So yes, I had a bit of a break. I had a bit of a think thought started to come together and fortunately signed a book deal. And then I was sort of on the hook and it became A Rolling Stone that gathered some momentum. It's taken me to a place that I'm actually quite proud of now. And I do think the process of writing is really undervalued or maybe under respected within designers. And I don't necessarily think it's about Telling the world what you reckon. It's about making sure you're comfortable with what you reckon or like playing it back to yourself. And so I've always found writing to be that for myself. So doing 85,000 words, taking the time, trying to put some structure behind it, trying to chapterise it, has been hugely beneficial to me. And I think whatever I move into next, I think I will do so with much more sort of structure and belief in what I loosely thought for many, many years.
- [24:42]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, writing is thinking and there's a lot of science behind this, that this process of getting an idea out of your head, you see that you can respond to it and you can formulate ideas in new ways and respond. It's sort of like a dialogue with yourself that is productive. Let's talk about the framework that is alluded to in the title. Could, should, might and don't. So for our listeners, can you break that down, what that means?
- [25:09]
Nick Foster
I think the first thing to start with is there's a sort of tendency that I'm picking up and I have picked up over the years in these types of books. And when I say these types of books, I mean books for designers, books for sort of business people, let's say, to kind of coin a term or create a framework or a matrix or a method or something, to scroll on a whiteboard or create some sort of shortcut to tool. And I really didn't want to do that. I don't find a lot of use for that way of working in my own practice. Stuart Candy, I think calls these things intellectual prostheses, which I kind of like. And there's a bit of stink on that, let's say, because I think it substitutes developing a kind of rigorous internal gut feel and a training of those muscles. It sort of shortcuts that somewhat. And so I really didn't want to create a book that had a sort of five step plan of how to become better at doing futures. So it really isn't that in order to understand what it is, then let me get to that. What I'm trying to do is trigger a recognition that thinking about the future is very, very important, almost certainly more important now than it ever has been in history. And yet none of us across many different disciplines is particularly good at it. And I think that represents a kind of critical weakness in our future. And so what I've done is offer maybe a taxonomy as opposed to a framework to say when any of us is called upon to think about the future, either in our professional lives or in public or in the news or down the pub, we tend to fall into one of these four buckets of thinking. What I wanted to do was hopefully by carving up this big process of thinking about the future into four more manageable buckets, at least we can kind of wrap our heads around it. And when we find ourselves talking about the future, or when we hear somebody doing it to us, we can say, ah, that feels a bit like could, or that feels a bit like should, futurism, or and understand the sort of origins and strengths and weaknesses of that. So without wanting to sort of overplay the point, I really don't want to create some sort of tool technique for people to use. It's more just I think these things go on and I think that leads to sort of non rigorous, unbalanced, biased, unfit for purpose futures work across the board. And so that's what I've written and it's been a really interesting process of checking myself against some of these as well.
- [27:32]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [27:39]
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- [29:16]
Aaron Walter
Brighter and I love it.
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- [30:06]
Aaron Walter
Don'T even know it.
- [30:07]
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- [31:29]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show.
- [31:36]
Eli Woolery
Could you walk through the framework that you've developed? This could, should, might, don't so audience can get a sense for what's involved.
- [31:43]
Nick Foster
Basically there's four major types of futures thinking that I think exist across the board. And the first thing from the get go is you shouldn't think of these as like separate circles on a Venn diagram. I think they all overlap. The edges are blurry, but maybe they represent kind of corners of a map and by pulling them out as maybe caricatures we can start to understand the territory a bit more. So the first type of futurism is what I call could futurism, which is probably the most familiar and publicly embraced type of futures work that we see. And it's what you see if you type the word futuristic into Google Image Search. It's all of the sort of overly ambitious, excitable, over the top stuff, you know, flying cars, humanoid robots, these ethereal kind of crystal cities that we see so much. And I encourage listeners to go to Google Image Search and type that in, or more pointedly, go to any image generator that we now have and just type in anything about the future and you'll get this kind of stuff back. And I think it's built off a backbone of science fiction lore. I think it's built off the growth of that medium and the tropes and the aesthetic and subject obsessions of that medium has led to this way of thinking and this way of portraying the future. And it's sort of built off a backbone of modernism as well, the idea that we can move forward through progress, through things like mechanization and industrialism and this notion of strident progress, really. And I think that seeps into our television culture, into our media. We see it in the press. We also experience it at things like World's Fairs, you know, through history. In the 1939 World's Fair, there was Futurama from GM, which had this huge diorama that people flew over in these cars that portrayed the world as this hugely transformed place, unsurprisingly through cars and freeways, but this hugely transformed, very ostentatiously different place. Millennium Dome was something similar. Epcot from Disney was something similar, trying to sort of rebuild and have these grand visions about the future. And the Museum of the Future in Dubai is something similar too, which is, again, it purports to talk about the future of the world, but it's got the same sorts of things. The robots, the delivery drones, the cyber dogs, the jetpacks, all the stuff we're used to seeing. And it also extends into things like trade shows like ces. We see these kinds of could futurists on stage talking about the future in sort of lofty but kind of vague ways, showing us amazing statistics, amazing things. And like I said, CES often has a lot of these bombastic pieces of overt, energetic futurism at the front of their stands. The problem of that way of thinking is because it builds so heavily off the ideas and the backbone of science fiction, it also falls prey to the fact, you know, science fiction is almost always built around storytelling, around a hero. And these Kinds of features feel very heroic. And the truth is the future will be filled with people like you and me. It will be filled with ordinary people having sort of ordinary jobs. And having conversations about those things can be much more yielding than having conversations about sort of heroes and villains. And I think this sort of backbone of science fiction lore has also obviously started creeping into the minds of the people creating the future. So I was in countless meetings, in numerous of my previous jobs with lots of people from lots of different backgrounds. And the number of times things like the Jetsons or Minority Report or the Matrix get referred to. At Google X, all of the meeting rooms were named after sci fi robots like R2D2 or HAL 9000. And Cortana, Microsoft's assistant, is named after a character in Halo. Jeff Bezos has named his holding company Zephram LLC after Zephram Cochrane, the Star Trek character that invented the warp drive. It sort of goes on and on. OpenAI trying to hire Scarlett Johansson to do the voice of their voice assistant after watching her, obviously, and naming their $500 billion artificial intelligence program Stargate after the 94 sci fi blockbuster. So I think could futurism represents that. It represents that sort of energetic, overtly futuristic type of futures thinking. And I think we see this a lot. And when I talk to people outside of my world of technology and design, it's the sort of tropes that get fired back at me when any conversation about the future tends to kick into gear.
- [36:06]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, so you're talking about transcendent scenarios where humans are so dramatically changed. What I often observe is people who are very good at thinking a few steps ahead of humanity and culture. They just have finely tuned observational skills about the human experience, what it means to be a human, and the continuation that it's not just like this single point of time. And it's always been this way, actually, it's been different in the past. So I don't know if you look to the past as well.
- [36:39]
Nick Foster
Yeah, all the time.
- [36:40]
Aaron Walter
Where does one start? When you're doing research and these early phases of trying to think about what could be in the next five to.
- [36:49]
Nick Foster
10 years, the easiest thing is to look outside your own window and truly look at your own lives. I think that's the best we can do. I mean, trends work is very, very popular, particularly in design. But you know, in other industries too, even in the finance industry, people look at trends of hobbies and habits and it has some sort of utility. I've never really used that work. I've also Done trends work. So I know how shallow a lot of it is, and I'm maybe being a bit rude there, but I think by collecting 20 images together or 20 data points together, you can convince an audience that there's a trend there that sort of maybe doesn't really exist in reality. But I think your first statement about the future, building upon the past is exactly where could futurism tends to lose its way, because it portrays the future as a. You know, that term Gesamt Kunstwerk, like a single piece of artwork that you've created somewhere out of nothing that doesn't generate itself from anything. But understanding the future as a sort of accretive place, a place that piles on the past like sedimentary rock. An understanding that, yes, we live in a world of chatgpt, but there are also coat hangers and clothes pegs and big biros and chairs that we inherited from our grandparents. Being able to talk about the future as an evolution of the present is an absolutely vital skill, because humans don't change as fast as we think they do. We can build new things socially, we can change our opinions quite quickly, but the core sort of motivational backbone of human beings has remained reasonably similar for as long as we can track. And I think understanding how humans fit into that changing shifting tide, where some things will move very, very quickly and change very quickly, but will also retain lots of things from the past. I think this is actually somewhere where some science fiction can do quite well. So things like Black Mirror, perhaps the first Blade Runner, where, yes, there were big changes and big technological shifts, but there were also still, in the case of Blade Runner, kind of rotten old leather jackets and rain and bits of grime. And in Black Mirror, there were kind of uncomfortable conversations and bad sweaters and things like that. You know, being able to sort of show change alongside continuity is a real skill, and a lot of people don't seem to have it.
- [39:00]
Aaron Walter
One of my favorite allegories for the future is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
- [39:05]
Nick Foster
Yes.
- [39:05]
Aaron Walter
Which was written in what, 1812 during Napoleonic wars by a young teenage girl. And the language, the dialogue, the tragedy of the human experience feels as fresh and relevant today as it must have been back then.
- [39:22]
Nick Foster
Yeah, absolutely could. Futurism is that one that really pushes into. Imagine all the things. Imagine what things could be like if you do that too much or you do that too often or you do that on its own. It takes you away naturally from reality and takes you into sort of fantasy and sort of wishful difference in a way that I find kind of Unhelpful. Should futurism is something slightly different. And so that's why it's got its own category. I think should futurism is built around this notion of certainty or assuredness about the future, and it tries to identify what the future will be. And that's quite helpful because it narrows down our realm of possibility. And if you say, well, the future is going to be this, so we can work backwards from that. It comes from a world of sort of predictions and using soothsaying and trying to figure out the future from Nostradamus and all this other stuff. But in contemporary society, I think that's best exemplified by what we call corporate strategy. The kind of McKinsey Bain BCG way of taking historical behaviors data and then turning that solid line into a dotted line and saying, well, it's pointing here, so that's the future. I've seen a lot of this. I've seen sort of the growth of this kind of consulting and corporate strategy work and the certainty that numbers give to those stories. That sort of numeric fiction holds an awful lot more weight than the kind of design work that we do or the stories that we tell, because there's something about numbers, there's something about numbers that make stories about the future feel much more rigorous and relevant than the stories that we can typically tell. And so that's why corporate strategy has grown so quickly, because it's so reassuring. You see a number that says 26 billion by 2035, you're like, well, okay, great. But those dotted lines are stories. They're not truths. Once that line goes from solid to dotted, it ceases to be data. It's a story at that point. There's that Wayne Gretzky quote that I hear a lot of corporate strategy folks using, which is, I skate to where the puck is going to be. I may be butchering that a little bit. And that really does sort of explode that worldview of saying, I know what the future holds and you need to do that today. And that sort of prediction and assertiveness about the future is what I call should futurism. When people find out what I do, one of the first things they ask me is for predictions. That seems to be what they want from people like me. Like, what do you think is going to happen to this? Or should I be investing in that? Or are robots really going to do this? And I don't know. I don't know. Nobody knows. That's the truth. And I think that's the biggest weakness of should futurism is that when we start to see the world as a kind of system to be decoded, something that we can model and break down with our algorithms and our maths, it builds a layer of certainty about the future, which can be counterproductive. It can make us feel like we can understand something. And if we just tweak the knobs and plug the right numbers in, we can certainly tell what the future holds. But the truth is, as we know, that many of the world's things that we now live with are hyper objects. They're just so unmappable and so vast. And also the data coming into them is always incomplete, sometimes hidden, and sort of increasingly stochastic as well, and variable. So any notion of being able to predict the future becomes a little less certain. And I think we're starting to see that now as many of the things we've thought of as being stable, anything could happen. LeBron could say something awful about your brand tomorrow or a ship could overturn in the Suez Canal and all of a sudden all your predictive modeling techniques just sort of fall down. So I think what we need to understand is that the future and the present is that term Vuca, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. I think we need to understand that more. And that's where I think should futurism, when done in isolation or to extremists, should futurism really falls down in that.
- [43:11]
Eli Woolery
Regard, I'm going to hit on what seems like just sort of a side note for a minute, but it leads to a real question. But earlier on you mentioned Futurama. Until you said it, I did not realize that originated from a real world thing. I love the show Futurama, the cartoon that was from the Simpsons creator. And they often will play out scenarios that are sort of in our present in what is supposedly a distant future in a humorous way. But it also explores some things like social media, other things that we're currently dealing with that have these potentially sort of dystopian consequences. And I'm curious if sort of in your mapping, how you think about how do we explore this sort of don't quadrant that there be monsters over here? How do we tell those stories in a way that makes sure that we understand that these technologies might lead us down a road that we don't really want to end up in?
- [43:55]
Nick Foster
Yeah. So we can maybe come back to might. But don't is the fourth of the quadrant that I talk about. And that is the world of sort of uncertainty, fearfulness and uncomfortable futures. And it's focused on what might go wrong, what negative consequences might come from a certain type of future, or the externalities that come with introducing something to the world. Fear is incredibly potent. It's sort of drilled into us from an early age. And all of our fairy tales and our sort of nursery rhymes and things like that are built around stories of fear. So Little Red Riding Hood, the Boy who Cried Wolf, they all say if you do these things, bad things might happen, so please don't do them. It's sort of the opposite of should. It's like shouldn't. Science fiction, as you said, loves to explore that space too. So there's quite a lot of science fiction work that looks at dystopias and societal collapses and technological overreach and all of these other things. And science fiction loves to play in that space, actually. And data is often used too, in that space to kind of show impending collapses. And we're all very used to that from things like Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and current projections of climate data and things. But it goes back to Limits to growth from the 1970s, being able to sort of say, these things are happening. We should be careful of where this might lead. And even before that, Thomas Malthus, who was projecting curves of sort of food production and consumption and saying, at some point those lines are going to cross and we're going to be in a quote unquote bad place. There's a more nuanced version of what I call don't futurism emerging and has emerged, which instead of saying, let's just stop and protest and tear it all down and flip the table and say this is bad. Actually, what it involves is sort of understanding the depth of impact that the thing we're talking about could have, the full scope of implications of the things that could come along with what we're doing and thinking about that in a kind of second and third order implications layer. So not just what might happen to it, but what might happen to the things that come after it. And trying to build that understanding of the sort of web of complexity that we might be setting in motion. And I think that's more interesting to me as a form of don't futurism, rather than pointing at something and saying it's disastrous, it's dystopian. We should stop actually starting to think from a kind of critical design, speculative design background and say, if we do these things, let's be responsible about all of the other things that we can think might happen around that that could lead to these Sorts of things that we might not want. That requires a level of responsibility that almost no company is willing to invest in. There's so much positivity and so much momentum and so much sort of internal advertising for ideas that it's very hard to have conversations about. We're not really sure or this might lead somewhere that we don't really know how to fix, or this could yield something that might cause us big problems later on. But I think we're all starting to realize we in the present, we're all starting to realize that we're living in time capsules that were accidentally planted by our predecessors. Those blurry people from grainy pictures who did things without really thinking long term about what it might mean or what it might lead to. And we're actually sort of spending our lives mopping up that. And I think that that level of sort of understanding is starting at the edges to trickle into business and design and manufacturing. And it's more than just corporate social responsibility. It's an understanding of when we do things at scale, they have big scale impact. The challenge of don't futurism, while I believe in it and I believe in its ambitions, is it's very hard to do in organizations because it doesn't have KPIs or ROIs. You can't put metrics to all the things you don't do. They just become invisible instantly. So it's very hard to justify the benefit of it. And it's often quite oppositional. It sort of divides teams into goodies and baddies. And that is a sort of ideological perspective. So for example, at Google X, the strap line of a company was to make the world a radically better place without ever really saying what better meant. And there's an assumption that we all agree on what better means. And for some things I think there's global agreement amongst many people. But it is an ideological standpoint. Like what I think is better is probably different in detail to what you think is better. And so that's where things start to become quite complicated. You can't just say good and bad, ideal and non ideal. We have to have more rigorous conversations about ideological stance. Again, a complicated thing to do in a fast moving innovation company. I would love to see more sort of critical design and speculative design and implication oriented design finding its way into these big organizations because I think if it willfully stands outside of them and doesn't tell stories that are inspirational or better than the sort of corporate stories the corporations are telling themselves, it'll continue to have sort of limited impact.
- [48:42]
Aaron Walter
This is the area where I have the most concern in our space is when I look at the list of words here and the way you define them, could, should, might, don't. In current times, I see that as a spectrum of the good things on the left and then the really negative things on the right. And in Silicon Valley, anyone involved in tech, I think we come into this space with a lot of great intentions and a lot of excitement about participating in creating a better future. And with that comes naivete, kind of a Pollyanni ish blindness to what could happen. And those of us who have been in the tech industry for a couple decades, we've been here long enough to see good intentions come in and then have really negative outcomes. Social media, et cetera, the iPhone, ubiquity and how that's changed our life and taken our attention, Instagram, et cetera, they're good things. We created them with really good intentions, but they have outcomes that are unexpected. And I have to admit that these days I feel a lot more fear and trepidation about the next five years, really than I feel that hopefulness that I once had as a younger man in design and technology. I'm curious where you sit with that.
- [50:00]
Nick Foster
Yeah, I mean, my father grew up in the 50s when the future was a positive place. I grew up in the 80s where the future was a positive place. And I think now we're living through an era where certainly if you look at the data on young people, there's this phrase ambient adolescent apocalypticism, which is this feeling that a lot of young people hold, that they look to the future and they don't like what they see. The challenge that we're facing is the notions of sort of good and bad and better and worse and preferable and undesirable and having those conversations about what we really mean by that and sort of saying, well, why? Well why? Well why? And going deeper is what we actually need to be doing more of, rather than sort of trying to put a stake in the ground and saying, good, bad, right, wrong. And I think the challenge with that is as designers try to integrate with other disciplines, trying to make big, complex things. I live and work in sort of Silicon Valley in the Bay Area. When you're in a room full of people, you could be in a room with a 65 year old ex hippie, big beard, recumbent bike, plays Dungeons and Dragons and War Games on the weekend. You could also be in a kind of puffy fleeced room with lots of people with branded fleeces who are like in venture capital, you could be in with some computer science guy, you could be in with a bunch of designers who are very excited about certain things and very different in their politics. The whole nature of better, worse in that room where all those people could be together in the room all trying to make a thing. Unless you have those conversations about better, worse, good, bad, really honestly and openly and start to flesh out, well, if we do that, then this might happen. If we do this, then these could be the implications of what we do. I just don't think we have that culture in place and it's actually quite difficult. And even us as individuals, we might think we have our own ideological map, but it changes day by day, case by case. And when given simple choices like should I buy this new thing or not, we have to sort of play with that mixing desk of our preferences, ideologies, beliefs, ourselves even. So when we're trying to do that with a group of people in a room, each of which have different motivations, different drivers, different preferences, different hatreds, it becomes really difficult. And so I think the kind of don't futurism that I can believe in is one that's just willing to have that conversation about responsibility and responsibility for the implications of what we might be setting in motion and open and honest debates about them, rather than the kind of don't futurism which is burn it all down, stop it, this is dystopian. This is the end times. Because I just feel like it's very easy to ignore that voice and dismiss it as sort of overly excited naysaying.
- [52:40]
Eli Woolery
I wonder if we could circle back. I know we're going out of order, but to the might futures. And one question I had was around, I think something you touched on earlier. There is this sense, I think in the 1970s, maybe due to the work of Paul Ehrlich, that we were headed for this overpopulation crisis where there would just be too many people to sustain on our current planet. But it seems anyway right now that that trend is changing. And in fact a lot of countries have lower than replacement level birth rates and it's a very different problem. So I'm curious how you think about these might futures where the data might be pointing in a certain direction right now, but it could actually change drastically. And that probably also relates to your earlier point about just the future being so unpredictable too. So how do you kind of reconcile those things?
- [53:22]
Nick Foster
Yeah, I mean, population is a really interesting one and it's something I've been fascinated in for A long time. So 100 years ago, let's say the life expectancy in the US was 55 years. So if I was living a hundred years ago, I would have about five years left of my life. But since I was born, so half a century ago, ish, the population of Earth has doubled since Adele released that song Rolling in the Deep that people love to sing at karaoke. We've added more than a billion net to the planet, which feels like a lot of change in a very short amount of time. Now all of the data that we have, all of the projections that we have for, is that a problem or not? And what constitutes a problem? We. I don't doubt it or deny it at all. I have no reason to. But we do have to ask sort of where it comes from. We have to ask where it might be pointing next and what stories we tell ourselves. We believe that it's going to plateau and therefore we're investing in sort of medical research and education of women and other sort of emancipatory technologies and techniques and societal shifts. But we do have to sort of say we might be wrong. It might continue to get steeper and steeper and steeper. And if it does, what might we do in that situation? Which is sort of at the heart of the Mike Futurists mindset, which is about looking to the future and thinking in a plural way. I think I've used the term futures quite a lot, which is a very trendy affectation when talking about this kind of work, which is we cannot know what the future holds. So it is absolutely vital that we consider as many different lines of inquiry as we can. And the doing the thinking is what matters, not necessarily coming up with the right answer. And a lot of that comes from early work of Cold War scenario planning, Rand and people like Herman Kahn and the work that was done at Royal Dutch Shell in scenario planning, I think now we loosely term it sort of foresight, strategic foresight, let's say. It's the kind of industry that perhaps represents best in class for commercial futures work right now, thinking about if this happens, then what if that then what? And building these sort of war games scenarios out into the future. And it's very methodological. It uses a lot of the sort of diagrammatic techniques that make me shudder a bit. Things like the Voros cone or the futures cone or the cone of uncertainty, which you may be familiar with, which looks at projecting forwards and starting to try and map out what might be probable, plausible or possible on a given timescale. So essentially what it does again is it starts to look at massive amounts of data coming in and tries to project forwards, like where it might go. And it's different to should futurism because it doesn't declare our data says this is going to happen. What it does, it says this is what we've got and all of these things might happen and what might we do in each of those different scenarios. I've done a lot of this sort of work before. I've been around people that do a lot of it. And I think it has benefits. It encourages people to think about what might happen in the future rather than what we want to happen or what we think will happen. It starts to open up that space. The challenge is, and we've seen this hundreds of times, people are very bad at imagining change and imagining scenarios in the future, and they typically, they can't think in exponential terms. That classic Ray Kurzweil quote, that the future is exponential, not linear. I've got his quote wrong, but you get the gist. And we typically build stories about the future based on our previous experience. And the classic example I use for this is the reason why illusionists and magicians work is because when you see a Harley Davidson appear from a previously empty box, it feels amazing because we've never seen it before. We've never imagined that that would happen because we've never experienced it before. But if he put three oranges in a box and then he opened the lid and there were three oranges in, that would feel completely logical to us. And I think that inability to imagine we've seen this before, companies like Nokia, who I mentioned in Blockbuster and Kodak, they just couldn't imagine a story where they wouldn't be dominant or where people wouldn't want to take photographs with film anymore, or even if they did, they put it way out into the sort of impossible, never happen or not in 20 years space. And so I think, Mike, futurism is that type of futurism that looks to the future and tries to tell multiple stories, but is also hamstrung by its own sort of tying itself up with its own methods and academia. And also an inability to imagine broadly enough, which I think sometimes can hamstring it.
- [57:53]
Aaron Walter
What have you been reading, watching, listening to? That is interesting and has you looking at the world with fresh eyes.
- [58:01]
Nick Foster
I obviously read a fair amount, but I watch a lot of YouTube. It's easy to mock YouTube and there's an awful lot of awful stuff on there that's just vacuous. Nonsense. But there's so much good stuff if you're able to duck underneath that sort of barrage of the big shouty stuff. It is a huge archive of documentary, of historical footage, of analysis, of essays. And so I've spent in writing this book a lot of Time on YouTube. In terms of what I've watched recently, I'm a big fan of Adam Curtis and his documentaries and the style of his documentaries too. And what he does is he takes archival footage, if you're not familiar archival footage with contemporary music, and he calls it remixing history, where he starts to pull on sort of threads of political news, of everyday life, of sound bite culture, pull it all together into stories about the past that I think help us understand the present and maybe start to point us towards more interesting, provocative futures. And he's just released a series on the BBC iplayer called Shifty, which is about living in the UK at the end of the 20th century. And it really triggered me a lot because I did, and I grew up in a sort of tumbling down industrial town that nobody seemed to care about. My father was laid off from his job at the railways by privatisation that came from London and just sort of didn't really care about. Folks, the documentary series Shifty is something that it'll probably make its way onto YouTube at some point, but at the moment it's on the BBC. But absolutely fascinating stuff. And all I'm trying to do with this book is do something similar to that, which is poke people and provoke them to have a sort of reassessment of when you close your eyes and think about the future, what comes to mind? Why does that stuff come to mind and where might it be coming from and what might it be lacking? And I think that conversation, if I can trigger that, that's enough to just crack open this conversation and hopefully there'll be 50 other smarter people who write 50 other smarter books after this. But if I can do that, I'll be happy.
- [60:02]
Aaron Walter
That's great. Well, that's a great place to wrap up and also to ask you, where can people learn more about your book and you and your work?
- [60:12]
Nick Foster
Best place to go for the book is Could, Should, Might, don't Com. And you can find out more about me at Nick Foster, rdi.com Fantastic.
- [60:21]
Aaron Walter
Nick Foster, thank you so much for being on Design Better.
- [60:24]
Nick Foster
Oh, it's been my pleasure. Nice to speak with you, chapstick.
- [60:31]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your Team Slack Channel designbetterpodcast. Com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.