Send message to Author

Paper Short Abstract:

In the face of present crises, some people cannot imagine any future or imagine a different one. This paper draws on a design anthropology project to reflect critically on the resources that are needed for future imagination and suggest for the past to be used as new material for design.

Paper Abstract:

Imagining a new and better future, is the pre-condition for people to take action and get involved in making the future they want. But in the face of ever new crises, some people cannot imagine any future, or struggle to imagine a radically different one. This article draws on a design anthropology project in community mental health with Gipsy, Roma and Travellers communities to reflect on the value of the interplay between past, present and future for motivating action among those groups that might feel stuck in a difficult present.

While most scholarship in design anthropology tends to focus on the role of the discipline for activating future possibilities, this paper starts from a failure to do that and to imagine ones’ future, and provides suggestions for how to 'un-stuck' futurity.

In my fieldwork doing and making futures did not mean the undoing of the past but actually the need to deal with it as a (so far) unused material for design. The forwarding of the role of the past should not be misunderstood as conservative. Like within the ethnographic accounts of improvisation in the Javanese dance (Hughes-Freeland, 2007), repetition is neither backwards nor romantic but a practice of creative resistance, where creativity plays a role in ensuring stability and continuation. This paper puts forward the idea that a dialogical temporal understanding of agency is needed for design anthropology to better engage with so called ‘marginalised groups’, when these feel they have no resources to imagine their future otherwise.