Mind the Story

Three research artefacts, Space2Go, ThingsWithdrawal and UnderAir, produced in the Making Everyday Futures workshop were presented at the Dutch Design Week 2017 as part of the Mind the Story; a platform at Mind the Step where researchers can present the stories behind their designs. We featured in the programme with a full day series of interactive resentations and demos titled ‘Posing Questions with Design’ on Sunday 22 October.

The audience was involved by voting on the provocative questions interwoven into the presentation, and by interacting with the researchers and artefacts in the subsequent demo sessions.

Over the course of the day we had approximately 250 attendees over four rounds of presenting.

Everyday futures does not yet exist as an established field, but we believe it is an area worthy of exploration. 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.