(Re) Building Futures
Interactive game-book for alternative future stories
What role can artefacts building on diverse epistemologies play in fostering complex, inclusive, and positive future narratives?
Future is a participatory book inviting users to explore different epistemologies, knowledge, and cultures (such as Indigenous Futurism, Queer Futures, and AfroFuturism) to build new stories of the future. An ephemeral artefact constantly re-written by its readers, Futures aims to question the often narrow and singular vision of the future in our modern society by opening the space for many stories to exist in parallel. Highlighting how cultures can be amplified and grow from one another, it examines our individual and collective responsibility toward the future we want to build.
This project builds on the idea that the future is not an empty concept but reflects our current lives, cultures, and values. Imagining the future is a never-neutral exercise of power impacting the past and the present: by developing specific ideas of the future, we can make political and social decisions to meet this hypothetical future (as we do today with climate change policies, for example).
Designed as an open format where pages can be rearranged to continuously rewrite the story, Futures invites readers to become actors by physically re-building the book to create their stories, destroying the previously written story: once they complete their stories, they should pass the book to someone else, who will rearrange the pages and write a new future story. The book highlights the multiplicities of possible futures, how easily stories can be rewritten, and how ideal visions of the future are often built on others’ ideals.
The book is composed of six types of pages: Instructions, Future Scenarios the reader will use as a starting point, illustrated Story Pages to build the story, Prompt pages to use at the beginning of each chapter, Blank Pages for the reader to write or draw missing things they want to include in their future, and Evaluation Pages allowing them to look back and reflect on the story they built. Illustrations rather than words for the Story Pages allow more freedom of interpretation for readers, focusing on what matters to them while sharing alternative ideas of the future in a visual and more accessible way beyond words and languages. Images were selected to elicit multiple potential futures, building on concepts such as connection to nature, sense of community, role of technologies, and all authors are credited at the end of the book.
Final card deck.
This project questions the roles and responsibilities of designers and researchers in promoting and developing particular ideas for the future. By amplifying a possible preferred future, design can make a difference in how we see and think about the present. However, there is a risk that those future visions reflecting our desires and preferences lead to the continuity of our present ways of living and the need for our community to keep challenging their biases and visions of the future.
Pictures of a reader building their future story and of their final book.